Thing and Space

This is a translation of Husserl's 'Thing-lectures' (Dingvorlesung) of 1907, published posthumously in 1973. The lectures deal with the constitution of the thing as a res extensa, an extended spatial structure filled with sensuous qualities and not yet with substantial or causal properties. Key to this phenomenological account is the role of the kinaesthetic systems of the body in the constitution of both three-dimensional space and the thing in its identity, its manifold of possible movements, and its position in relation to the ego. The 'Thing-lectures' form part of the project of a 'phenomenology and critique of reason' announced in a general introduction to the same lectures and published separately as The Idea of Phenomenology. There for the first time the idea of a transcendental phenomenology based on the principle of the phenomenological reduction was laid out. The lectures presented here thus form a striking example of the application of this idea to a concrete and fundamental field of research.