Introduction

Abstract

At the end of the 1960s, Patocka claimed that the philosophical relation and dispute between Husserl and Heidegger was a burning issue in the phenomenological thinking of the day; a challenging problem, demanding a great effort to achieve a deeper understanding of Phenomenology. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty was proposing that Husserl had done all the work, and that Heidegger had basically followed his teacher’s indications, contributing novel aspects and layers to the phenomenological way of philosophizing. I believe that even today, almost five decades after these estimations, the issues remain unresolved and are of perhaps even more burning importance.

The decades that have passed have provided us with some more hints, but these have not yet satiated our need to penetrate into the depths of the difficulties surrounding the philosophical relation between Husserl and Heidegger. The character and fate of phenomenological philosophy, as well as its place in the present philosophical milieu, depend crucially on the way we understand the complexities that connect the thinking of these two great philosophers. We still need to clarify what happened during the period between the publication of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900–1901) and the appearance of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), and the parting of the ways that followed almost immediately after the latter succeeded the former in the chair of philosophy at Freiburg, in 1928. What Phenomenology was and can be, and whether this philosophy can in some form stand powerfully next to other philosophies, vis-à-vis the philosophical problems of the past and, more importantly, the critical problems of the present historical situation, are questions that can be answered once we have deepen our understanding of this issue.