1 The present volume is rich in essential phenomenological descriptions 2 and insightful historico-critical analyses, some of which cannot be fully appreciated, however, except by close examination on the part of the reader. Accordingly, such a task ought to be left to the consideration and judgment of the latter, save where such discussions are directly relevant to the topics I will be dwelling upon. I prefer, then, to approach the matters and questions contained here otherwise, namely, archeologically. In this I 3 follow Jose ´ Huertas-Jourda, the editor of the corresponding French vol- 4 ume, in his felicitous terminological choice, although I adopt it here for my purposes in an etymological sense, i. e. , as signifying a return to prin- 5 ciples or origins. This, after all, is consistent not only with the spirit and practice of phenomenology, as acknowledged by Aron Gurwitsch often enough, but as well with what he has actually said, to wit: it is a qu- tion of 1 Cf. , e. g. , infra,in An Outline of Constitutive Phenomenology, Chapter 4, pp. 185 ff. (Henceforth I shall refer to this book as Outline. ) This essay will be devoted to the study of selected parts of the contents of this volume, although, when necessary, use will be made here of other works by various authors, including Gurwitsch. 2 Cf. , e. g. , ibid. , Chapter 3, pp. 107 ff.
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of the French intellectual milieu of the 1930s when French phenomenology initially developed, and also two originally unpublished essays from that period.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.
