Translator and Editor’s Introduction -- Translator and Editor’s Introduction -- Biographical Sketch of Aron Gurwitsch -- An Outline of Constitutive Phenomenology -- Author’s Introduction -- The Problem of the Philosophy of Consciousness -- The Natural Attitude and the Phenomenological Reduction -- The Conception of Consciousness -- The Structure of the Perceptual Noema -- Essay -- Some Fundamental Principles of Constitutive Phenomenology -- Theme and Attitude -- Husserl’s Theory of the Intentionality of Consciousness in Historical Perspective -- Towards a Theory of Intentionality -- The Phenomenology of Perception:Perceptual Implications -- The Perceptual World and the Rationalized Universe -- Critical Reviews -- Gaston Berger, Le Cogito Dans La Philosophie de Husserl (Paris: Aubier/ Éditions Montaigne, 1941), 159 pp -- Gaston Berger, “Husserl et Hume,” Revue Internationale De Philosophie, Vol. I (1939), pp. 342–353 -- Gaston Berger, Recherches Sur Les Conditions De La Connaissance. Essai D’une Théoretique Pure (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1941), 193pp -- Marvin Farber, The Foundation Of Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and the Quest for a Rigorous Science of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1943; 2nd. ed. (New York: Paine-Whitman Publishers, 1962), XI and 585 pp -- James Street Fulton, “The Cartesianism of Phenomenology,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. XLIX (1940), pp. 285–308 -- Jean Hering, “La Phénoménologie D’edmund Husserl il y a Trente ans. Souvenirs et Réflexions D’un Étudiant De 1909.” Revue Internationale De Philosophie, Vol. I, No. 2 (1939), pp. 366–373 -- “Preface” to Quentin Lauer, The Triumph of Subjectivity (New York: Fordham University Press, 1958), pp. V–Viii -- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie De La Perception (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1945), Xvi and 531 pp. -- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Trans. C. Smith (New York: The Humanities Press, 1962), pp. Xxii and 466 -- Maurice Pradines, Philosophie De La Sensation. II. La Sensibilité élémentaire. Les Sens De La Défense. Publications De La Faculté Des Lettres De L’université De Strasbourg, Fascicule 66 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1934), 381 pp -- Yves Simon, Études sur l’idée de nécessité dans la pensée scientifique et en philosophie (Montréal: Éditions de l’Arbre, 1944).

The first of a planned six volumes of Gurwitsch’s writings, this volume contains, above all, the English translation of his Esquisse de phénoménologie constitutive, the text based on his four lecture courses at Institute d’Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques at the Sorbonne during the 1930s. These lectures were regularly attended by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The book relates Husserlian or constitutive phenomenology to modern first philosophy and the philosophy of the human as well as the natural sciences and was nearly finished when Gurwitsch had to flee to the United States before Germany conquered France. In addition, this volume contains what is in effect Gurwitsch’s autobiographical sketch, critical reviews of works by Gaston Berger, Jean Hering, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Pradines, and Ives Simone, members of the French intellectual milieu of the 1930s when French phenomenology initially developed, and also two originally unpublished essays from that period. Finally, there are three essays and two reviews from Gurwitsch’s American period in which phenomenological philosophy and especially his revised account of the noema is also placed in historical perspective.