This is an unusual volume. During his periods of study with Ed mund Husserl - first from I924 1. 0 I926, then from I93I to I932 - Dorion Cairns had become imnlensely impressed with the stri king philosophical quality of Husserl's conversations with his students and co-workers. Not unlike his daily writing (five to six hours a day was not uncommon, as Husserl reports herein, the nature of which was a continuous searching, reassessing, modi fying, advancing and even rejecting of former views), Husserl's conversations, especially evidenced from Cairns's record, were remarkable for their depth and probing character. Because of this, and because of the importaIlt light they threw on Husserl's written and published works, Cairns had early resolved to set down in writing, as accurately as possible, the details of these conversations. Largely prompted by the questions and concerns of his students, including Cairns, the present Conversations (from the second period, I93I-I932, except for the initial conversation) provide a significant, intriguing, and always fascinating insight into both the issues which were prominent to Husserl at this time, and the way he had come to view the systematic and historical placement of his own earlier studies. Cairns had often insisted - principally in his remarkable lec 1 tures at the Graduate Faculty of the New School - that attaining a fair and accurate view of Husserl's enormously rich and complex 1 Cairns's lectures between 1956 and 1964 are especially important.

"[A] magnificent work... that will definitely shape the discussion on Derrida for years to come." -- Rodolphe Gasché What is the nature of the relationship of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction to Edmund Husserl and phenomenology? Is deconstruction a radical departure from phenomenology or does it trace its origins to the phenomenological project? In Derrida and Husserl, Leonard Lawlor illuminates Husserl's influence on the French philosophical tradition that inspired Derrida's thought. Beginning with Eugen Fink's pivotal essay on Husserl's philosophy, Lawlor carefully reconstructs the conceptual context in which Derrida developed his interpretation of Husserl. Lawlor's investigations of the work of Jean Cavaillà ̈s, Tran-Duc-Thao, and Jean Hyppolite, as well as recent texts by Derrida, reveal the depth of Derrida's relationship to Husserl's phenomenology. Along the way, Lawlor revisits and sheds light on the origin of many important Derridean concepts, such as deconstruction, the metaphysics of presence, différance, intentionality, the trace, and spectrality.

The present volume containing the dissertation of Dorion Cairns is the first part of a comprehensive edition of the philosophical papers of one of the foremost disseminators and interpreters of Husserlian phenomenology in North-America. Based on his intimate knowledge of Husserl’s published writings and unpublished manuscripts and on the many conversations and discussions he had with Husserl and Fink during his stay in Freiburg i. Br. in 1931-1932 Cairns’s dissertation is a comprehensive exposition of the methodological foundations and the concrete phenomenological analyses of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology.The lucidity and precision of Cairns’s presentation is remarkable and demonstrates the secure grasp he had of Husserl’s philosophical intentions and phenomenological distinctions. Starting from the phenomenological reduction and Husserl’s Idea of Philosophy, Cairns proceeds with a detailed analysis of intentionality and the intentional structures of consciousness. In its scope and in the depth and nuance of its understanding, Cairns’s dissertation belongs beside the writings on Husserl by Levinas and Fink from the same period.