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Husserl Studies 15: 125–136, 1998.

Book Review

Lester Embree, et al., eds. Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Contributionsto Phenomenology, vol. 18. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. xiv+ 764 pages. \$450.00.

This work is a model of what a specialized encyclopedia should be. It is anexcellent instrument de travail: comprehensive, informative, imaginative,and easy to use. It is clearly organized and its articles are written by recog-nized scholars. It has depth: it gets more interesting and interwoven the moreone looks into it. It will doubtlessly remain the most authoritative referencework on phenomenology for many years, the encyclopedic analogue ofSpiegelberg’s enduring history of the phenomenological movement. LesterEmbree is the chief editor and ten others are listed as co-editors. It is obvious– from the richness and originality of the topics, and from the diversity andappropriateness of the authors – that many minds contributed to the planningof the book and that the editors were in touch with developments throughoutthe world. The essays are well-written and well-edited: they are crisp anduniform in style, bearing the marks of meticulous copy-editing, with mini-mal typographical errors. Each contribution provides a platform for furtherresearch of the topic in question. Almost every entry is followed by a selectbibliography.

The idea of the encyclopedia was suggested by Kluwer in early 1992, sothe project had a five-year gestation period. A very long index is included forthe entire volume. Most of the entries in the index are proper names (personsand places) but there are also some thematic entries. The philosophical com-petence of the contributors means that the articles do not simply inform thereader of what has happened or what some term signifies, but contain philo-sophical reflection and developments of their own. Each of the authors isfully up to the material covered. It is also very much to the editors’ creditthat the encyclopedia is not biased; it does not exclude any of the majordevelopments or viewpoints within phenomenology. The authors, topics, andinterpretations come from almost all of the various strands of phenomenol-ogy, and due recognition is given to other philosophical traditions. The bookbears witness to the generous and ecumenical character of phenomenology.

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Lester Embree outlines the scope, conventions, and history of the projectin a two-page Preface. He and J.N. Mohanty contribute a ten-page Introduc-tion that sketches the major historical stages of phenomenology and con-trasts it with several contemporaneous philosophical movements. The overallformat of the work is straightforward. The 166 entries are listed alphabeti-cally. For the purposes of this review, the articles can be classified under fourheadings: (1) some treat the major traditional concepts in phenomenology,such as evidence, mathematics, noema, and relativism; (2) others describethe development of phenomenology in various countries; (3) some discussthe life and works of major thinkers in the phenomenological movement; (4)still others treat important new areas of controversy, such as artificial intelli-gence, cognitive science, ecology, and feminism, or areas to which phenom-enology can be applied, such as architecture, theater, dance, music, andnursing.

1.

The correlated topics of “Truth” and “Evidence” are treated by Dieter Lohmarand Elizabeth Ströker. After showing the relationship between truth and evi-dence (which is defined as the experience of truth), Lohmar shows that truthis not to be restricted to correspondence. He distinguishes four senses oftruth and treats the related themes of apodicticity, adequacy, and intuition.The contrast between truth in the lifeworld and truth in science is drawn, andHeidegger’s ideas about unconcealment and the modes of inauthentic speechand action are discussed, as well as the relation between freedom and truth.Ströker in turn shows how Husserl “has given the most detailed analysis ofevidence ever offered in philosophy.” She traces the elements of empty in-tention and fulfillment and shows that evidence takes on complex forms ap-propriate to the specific kind of object being presented (evidenced) in it.Fred Kersten contributes two entries related to truth, under the headings of“Intentionality” and “Constitutive Phenomenology.” He differentiatesHusserl’s notion of intentionality from that of Brentano, showing that Husserldoes not appeal to the “intentional inexistence” that is so important forBrentano. Husserl, therefore, does not need to move from an intentional in-existence to a real existent. As Kersten says, “there is a ‘transcendental ide-alism’ only by virtue of a ‘transcendental realism’.” He also describes manykinds of intentionality and the syntheses achieved in them. Kersten’s essaysare particularly terse and exact, reflecting the standard established by histeacher Dorion Cairns in the use of English as a vehicle for phenomenology.

The essays by William R. McKenna, on “Epoche- and Reduction” and “Per-ception in Husserl,” are particularly valuable. The epoch is described as thee-

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special kind of “refraining” that opens intentionality to us and puts us intophilosophical reflection. McKenna is especially clear on the kind of neu-tralization that takes place in the epoch and reduction. In normal reflectionon our positional acts, our reflective act is itself positional; it shares in themodal conviction of the act being reflected on. In phenomenological reflec-tion, however, the reflecting act does not so share: “a neutralized reflectiondoes not merely not so posit [as the underlying act does], it precisely refrainsfrom so positing”; it does not, however, shut off the positing of the underly-ing act. The transmutations of modes of belief that occur when we movefrom ordinary experience to philosophy are very subtle and McKenna doesjustice to them, insisting that “this reflecting exhibits a respect for the evi-dence of perception” while yet “disclosing the subjective accomplishments”that achieve evidence in the natural attitude. McKenna also shows how per-ception is not confined to one single level of experiencing, but that it con-tains the seeds of higher-level intentions. One can trace “logical syntax, suchas the disjunctive form, back to the experience of perceptual conflict.” Healso provides an elegant description of perceptual fields and the role of sen-sations in perception, showing how phenomenology can address “problemsabout the objective reference of perception that were created by Cartesiandualism.”

The entry on “Intersubjectivity” is written by Iso Kern, who edited thethree volumes of Husserliana devoted to that topic. He surveys the develop-ment and changes in Husserl’s writing on this subject, showing how Husserldifferentiated himself from Theodor Lipps and how he tried several ways ofdescribing our experience of other selves, abandoning some approaches ashe went along. Kern then gives a systematic treatment drawn from CartesianMeditations, Husserl’s lectures in 1926–27, and his work in the 1930s. Thedifficult topic of the reduction to the sphere of ownness is treated; two sensesof this sphere are distinguished and the “motivations” within this sphere thatestablish our experience of other selves are described: they are based on therecognition of the other body as the location for a point of view on the worldthat is irreducibly different from our own. The “apperceptive transfer” thatarises within the sphere of ownness and registers the presence of anothermind is “not a discursive act of thinking or a logical inference,” but an im-mediate “pairing” presentation. This lowest level of intersubjective empathyis the foundation for higher-level “social acts” in which we not only perceivesomeone as another self but also address him as such, which can be done notonly by language but also by other kinds of signs and gestures. The expres-sion of an intention to communicate is essential to such acts.

A long and perspicuous article by Eduard Marbach deals with “Represen-tation,” a phenomenological theme that “explicates the distinctions” amongsuch intentions as picturing, imagining, remembering, recognizing other

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minds, and the like. Being human means being able to displace ourselvesinto other presentational contexts. The work of Fink, Conrad, Sartre, andothers is acknowledged. Marbach elegantly shows that pictures do not ap-pear simply in the unity of the perceptually real world, but in a space of theirown, and that imagining does not involve mental pictures. John B. Brough’sessay on “Time” is not only strikingly clear but at times almost lyrical. Heshows how Husserl first developed his triadic structure for temporal experi-ence (retention, protention, primary impression) and how he then (around1910) moved this structure from the flow of conscious experience to a deeperlevel, to “the absolute time-constituting flow of consciousness,” which is“neither separate nor separable” from the immanent objects it constitutes.This absolute flow, Brough says, “illuminates the hospitality of conscious-ness” since it is so purely formal or content-free, and yet it permits “theabiding unity and identity of one’s conscious life.” He continues, “Particularexperiences come and go; the flow abides, supporting the interplay of unityand multiplicity, of identity and difference that marks the life of conscious-ness in time.” The structure of inner time-consciousness shows that in Husserlthe ego “can hardly be seen as a nontemporal monad sealed up in eternalself-presence: it is openness and transcendence at the very point of its gen-esis.” Differences and similarities between Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre,Merlau-Ponty, and Derrida are also discussed.

The essay by Gilbert T. Null on “Formal and Material Ontology” addressesimportant issues that are too rarely discussed in phenomenology. With a so-phisticated command of logical and mathematical theory, Null shows howHusserlian themes might be reactivated in post-Tarskian terms, insisting thatset-theoretic analysis needs to be complemented by content analysis (whichis expressed in part-whole logic). He says that “the instancing relation is tothe generalization relation as the membership relation is to the subset rela-tion.” The natures of regional and formal ontologies are discussed and re-lated to linguistic grammar, and Husserl is related to the Boolean logic ofsentences and contrasted with the Fregean logic of predicates. This very origi-nal essay deserves extensive unpacking and exploitation; it would be a re-warding project to pull together in a comprehensive study suchphenomenological themes as formal ontology, part-whole structure, formallogic, linguistic syntax, speech acts, categorial intuition, and empty and filledintentions. John J. Drummond contributes two essays, on “Noema” and“Space.” He traces the development of the concept of noema in Husserl andgives a thorough account of the current controversy about its meaning (acontroversy in which Drummond himself is one of the main participants).The major question is whether or not the noema serves as a kind of mediatorfor intentionality. Drummond and his associates say no, while Føllesdal andhis colleagues say yes. The former distinguish the noema from sense, the

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latter tend to identify them. This long-running dispute is not unimportant, asit is related to the meaning of intentionality and the nature of philosophicalanalysis. Drummond also discusses Gurwitsch and Daubert on the noema.His entry on “Space” shows the relationship between kinesthesia and thepresentation of objective space; it discusses geometric and lived space, dis-tancing and orbiting, tactile and visual space (stressing the paradigmatic roleof the hand and fingers in the constitution of the former), and shows howlived space is formalized first into Euclidian space and then into hyperspaces.The works of Becker, Heidegger, Claesges, Ströker, Bachelard, and Caseyare also treated.

Many other entries could be discussed at length. The first sentence ofthe first article in the book (on “Action,” by Bernard Waldenfels) starts thevolume off in elegant style: “Like perception and language, action doesnot merely take place within the world, but rather contributes to its consti-tution.” The entry on “Ego” by James Mensch explores not only Husserlbut Sartre and others on how an ego is or is not given, identified, and con-stituted out of a pre-egological domain. Edward S. Casey contributes theentry on “Memory” and co-authors the one on “Imagination” with Eliza-beth A. Behnke and Susumu Kanata; Behnke also writes the essay on“Body.” The entry on “Dasein” is by John D. Caputo and that on “Funda-mental Ontology” by Theodore Kisiel. “Mathematics,” written by RichardTieszen, treats not only Husserl’s interpretation of mathematical entitiesas categorial objects, but also discusses Hilbert, Weyl, Heyting, Martin-Löf, and especially Gödel. “History” is treated by David Carr, “Relativ-ism” by Gail Soffer, and “Meaning” by J.N. Mohanty, who makes animportant distinction between analytic philosophy, where meaning is a func-tion of a sentence or a word, and phenomenology, where meaning is a func-tion of an intentional act. Thomas M. Seebohm writes on “Reason” and“Hermeneutics,” Graeme Nicholson on “Hermeneutic Phenomenology,”Donn Welton on “World,” John Scanlon on “Eidetic Method,” and AlgisMickunas on “Emotion.” The essay on “Religion” by James G. Hart firstsketches the history of the phenomenology of religion (Scheler, Husserl,Otto, Heidegger, Levinas, and others, including Duméry and Findlay) andthen presents a sensitive study of the special kind of absence and tran-scendence that religious experience involves, along with remarks abouthow the religious sense of the whole and the first can be related to thewhole and the origin discovered by phenomenological reflection. Thearticle on “Aesthetics,” by J. Claude Evans, Elizabeth A. Behnke, andEdward S. Casey, discusses the contributions made by phenomenologiststo the understanding of art, with special reference to German and Frenchthinkers.

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2.

The treatment of national trends covers, of course, the countries in whichphenomenology originally developed and flourished, namely, Germany, Aus-tria, and France. There is one entry covering both The Netherlands and Flan-ders and none for Belgium. Italy, Great Britain, and the United States arediscussed, and there are separate articles on Canada, Portugal, Scandinavia,and Spain, as well as a series of essays on central and eastern Europe: onCzechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia, with one essay on Russiaand another on the USSR. Finally, in this treatment of national developments,there are also entries on countries in continents other than Europe and NorthAmerica. The essay on Spain includes Latin America, and there are entrieson Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea, and South Africa. Each of thesearticles gives a survey of how phenomenology either arose originally or wasbrought into the country in question, how it developed there, who are theindigenous scholars and writers active in phenomenology, and what themeshave been especially cultivated.

As a sampling of the authors of these articles, Ernst Wolfgang Orth andThomas M. Seebohm write the entry on Germany, Jean-François Courtinethat on France, and Wolfe Mays, Joanna Hodge, and Ulrich Haase the articleon Great Britain. Lester Embree and four colleagues (James M. Edie, DonIhde, Joseph J. Kockelmans, and Calvin O. Schrag) contribute the long entryon the United States, and Dagfinn Føllesdal the piece on Scandinavia. Theessay on Russia is written by Victor Molchanov and that on the USSR byMaija Küle, from Latvia. The essay on India is written by J.N. Mohanty andD.P. Chattopadhyaya, Iso Kern writes the entry on China, and Hiroshi Kojimathe one on Japan. The essay on Spain and Latin America is by Roberto Walton.

Among these essays, I would especially like to mention the entry on Aus-tria by Barry Smith. It furnishes rich geographic, historical, and biographicinformation about the beginnings of phenomenology, starting with Bolzano(d. 1848). It develops the essential teaching of Brentano and shows howHusserl worked out his new concept of intentionality. Smith moves into somespeculative approaches of his own by distinguishing between “attributive”adjectives (red house) and “modifying” adjectives (genuine gold, avertedhandshake). The distinction allows him to discuss the problem of referenceand “nonexistent objects” such as fictional “entities.” There follows a dis-cussion of gestalt psychology and part-whole logic, as well as a treatment ofthe influence of phenomenology on such writers as Robert Musil and FranzKafka. The early twentieth-century Hapsburg world of Vienna, Prague, Lwów,Graz, and Trieste is described. Smith discusses Twardowski, �ukasiewicz,Frege, Meinong, Mach, Carnap and others, and draws comparisons betweenphenomenology on the one hand and Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle on

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the other. An enormous amount of historical erudition and philosophicalthought is compressed into this entry. The essay on Poland, by KrystynaGórniak-Kocikowska, discusses the work of Roman Ingarden and also theinfluence of phenomenology (mainly through Scheler) on Karol Wojty�a. Itdocuments the intensive philosophical activity in Poland during the past fiftyyears, with an emphasis on what has occurred since the end of the Cold War.The essay on Russia shows that some thinkers in the 19th century (Kireyevskyand Khomyakov) anticipated some of the themes of phenomenology throughtheir analysis of consciousness. It also describes the work of VladimirSolovyov (d. 1900) and shows its similarity to phenomenology. Husserl ex-ercised considerable influence in Russia at the beginning of the century, es-pecially through Nicolai Lossky and Gustav æpet (one of his students), whocommented on his works and wrote material of their own. The article on theUSSR shows that phenomenology began to appear in the 1960s and grew ininfluence in the subsequent decades, with centers in Georgia, Moscow, andRiga. The work of many thinkers is acknowledged, along with that of theliterary theorist Mikhail Bahktin.

The essay on Czechoslovakia, by Josef Moural, observes that “during1934–39 Prague was the world capital of Husserlian phenomenology.” Planswere made to transfer Husserl’s manuscripts to that city, but because of his-torical developments they were moved to Louvain instead, through the ef-forts of Herman Leo Van Breda. This essay devotes considerable attention tothe work of Jan Pato�ka. The article on China notes that 130,000 copies ofthe translation of Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenology were printed, and ex-presses hope for “creative and original work” in phenomenology, in coop-eration with the Chinese Buddhist tradition of the analysis of consciousness.The article on India shows how consciousness, epoch , reduction, and con-stitution have analogues in the Hindu and Buddhist thinkers of that nation; itstresses the richness of the analyses of consciousness found in their philo-sophical schools. The ongoing contacts between phenomenology and Japa-nese thought, begun through the work of Kitar Nishida before World War I,are extensively documented in the article on Japan, with the observation thatJapanese thinkers strive to overcome both the subject-object and body-minddichotomies of modern Western thought.

3.

Besides an article on Husserl (by R. Philip Buckley) and one on Heidegger(by Thomas Nenon), there is a long entry on “Husserl and Heidegger” byTheodore Kisiel. The relationship between the two men, “at the very heart ofthe phenomenological movement,” is considered in four stages: old teacher

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and young student (1916–19), seminar director and assistant (1919–23),Heidegger’s Marburg period (1923-28), estrangement and denunciation(1928–31). The dramatic action that took place between these two men dem-onstrates how hard it is to make a theoretical distinction without also bring-ing about a personal division, especially in the early years of one’sphilosophical life. One of the most interesting themes in this essay is theprominence of categorial intuition as the central point of contact between thetwo thinkers. Kathleen Haney contributes an excellent essay on Edith Stein,tracing her relationship with Husserl, her philosophical and theological de-velopment, her work on empathy and the human person, and her editorialwork for Husserl, not only on the lectures on time but also on Ideas II. Shenotes that in the early 1930s Stein “was recognized as the intellectual leaderof Catholic feminism in Europe.” Stein’s religious thoughts and religiouslife, culminating in her death at Auschwitz, are presented with clarity andreverence.

There are altogether almost forty entries on individual persons. In eachcase, the essay presents the life and development of the philosopher in ques-tion, highlights major doctrines, and provides a bibliography. As one wouldexpect, there are essays on major figures such as Beauvoir (Jeffner Allen),Binswanger (Aaron Mishara), Brentano (Dieter Münch), Fink (RonaldBruzina), Foucault (Stephen H. Watson and David Vessey), Gadamer (RobertJ. Dostal), Gurwitsch (Lester Embree), Ingarden (Andrzej Przylebski), Koyré(Karl Schuhmann), Levinas (Adriaan Peperzak), Marcel (Thomas Busch),Merleau-Ponty (Henry Pietersma), Ortega Y Gasset (Jorge Garcia-Gómez),Ricoeur (Charles E. Reagan), Sartre (Richard Holmes), Scheler (ManfredFrings), and Schutz (Fred Kersten). There is a special entry on “Ethics inSartre” by Thomas R. Flynn. The essay on Derrida was handled diplomati-cally, having been co-authored by a critic (J. Claude Evans) and a supporter(Leonard Lawlor), thus showing that differences can be overcome. The Japa-nese phenomenologist Kitar Nishida and the Vietnamese Tran Duc Thaohave entries, by Tadashi Ogawa and Daniel Herman respectively. A numberof twentieth-century thinkers whose work became at least tangentially re-lated to phenomenology are also treated, such as Arendt (John Francis Burke),Bergson (Pierre Kerszberg), Cassirer (Ernst Wolfgang Orth), Dilthey (RudolfA. Makkreel and Jacob Owensby), Hartmann (Robert Welsh Jordan), Jas-pers (Osborne P. Wiggins and Michael Alan Schwarz), Simmel (John E.Jalbert), and Weber (Thomas Nenon).

An entry on Frege by J.N. Mohanty summarizes the continuing debate onthe relationship between Frege and Husserl. An elegant essay on WilliamJames by Richard Cobb-Stevens highlights themes in James that are similarto those in phenomenology, noting the irony that James at one time recom-mended against publication of an English translation of Husserl’s Logical

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Investigations. An essay on Wittgenstein by Harry P. Reeder presents thestages in Wittgenstein’s development and reviews the various responses thathave been given by scholars to the question whether Wittgenstein’s philoso-phy can be said to be phenomenological. Finally, some earlier German philo-sophical figures are treated not for their own sake but in respect tophenomenology: Fichte (Dieter Münch), Hegel, Kant (both by Frank M.Kirkland), and Schelling (Alan White).

4.

An indication of the forward-looking character of this encyclopedia is theinclusion of many essays on topics that have emerged in the past few dec-ades, and entries dealing with the application of phenomenology to variousdomains. Thus, Hubert Dreyfus writes on “Artificial Intelligence,” distin-guishing between an approach that appeals to mental representations (whichhe associates with Husserl and with a special sense of the noema) and onethat tries to model the way neurons work. The latter eschews mental symbolsand rules and permits a more “Heideggerian” interpretation of how we react– and can work out programs to react – to “the solicitations of the situation.”The essay surveys the work of Newell, Minsky, and Winograd, and intro-duces some recent work being done at MIT that adopts a more straightfor-ward sense of presence. One of the researchers, David Chapman, is quotedas saying, “You don’t need to maintain a world model; the world is its ownbest representation,” a phrase that aptly catches the sense of Husserlian in-tentionality. An article on “Communicology” by Richard Leo Lanigan de-scribes at length the important work of Roman Jakobson, who was very muchinfluenced by Husserl. It also shows that Husserl was appreciated by suchwriters as Ogden and Richards, Bühler, and Peirce. The linkage betweenphenomenology and the “rhetorical branch of linguistics” deserves to be fur-ther exploited. A very informative article on “Analytic Philosophy” by DavidWoodruff Smith traces the development of that movement through severalstages: first, Frege, Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein; then, logical positiv-ism; then, ordinary language; then, the work of Quine, followed by issues inmodal logic; finally, issues of intentionality, functionalism, the mind-bodyproblem, and cognitive science. The issue of sense and reference remains aperennial problem throughout. As he describes these stages, Smith bringsout parallels and contrasts with phenomenology and discusses very manyauthors. In the entry on “Cognitive Science,” by Osborne P. Wiggins andManfred Spitzer, the authors use the learning of grammatical rules as a para-digm. They show that according to connectionist theories of the mind, chil-dren can learn to follow a grammatical rule without explicitly learning the

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rule itself; it is also not necessary to posit an innate rule stored in the brain.The authors survey some recent work in neuroscience and show howphenomenological concerns with embodiment and the primacy of percep-tion can dovetail with it. Although cognitive science works within a natural-istic framework, it can, they say, interact fruitfully with phenomenology, justas gestalt psychology did. An article on “Technology” by Don Ihde givesHeidegger credit for establishing a philosophical study of this topic. Ihdenotes that Husserl restricted himself almost entirely to the domain of theo-retical science; he discussed Galileo’s mathematization of nature, but didnot advert to his use of instrumentation in science.

There is an entry on “Political Philosophy,” written by Bernard P.Dauenhauer, who finds abundant material on this topic in phenomenology,citing inter alia the lifeworld of Husserl, Heidegger’s analysis of humanexistence, the work of Arendt, the Frankfurt School, Gadamer’s critique ofthe Enlightenment project, the work of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and con-temporary thinking in France and the United States. In my opinion, however,these contributions form only some of the preconditions for political phi-losophy; they contest some Enlightenment doctrines that render politicalactivity impossible, and so they help clear a space for political thought andaction, but they do not replace the Enlightenment project with a true politicalphilosophy. It seems to me they comprise more a social rather than a politi-cal philosophy. They do not clarify the nature of the human good, nor do theyhelp mediate the arguments proposed by people who claim they should rulein a given political society. It is symptomatic that Alexandre Kojève, who sostrongly influenced the French branch of the movement (“at the root of[Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s] political thought . . . are the lectures ofAlexandre Kojève on Hegel”) was of the opinion that political life had cometo an end. Kojève was a prime example of the triumph of modernity. I ex-press my reservation on this point because of a remark on political philoso-phy I wish to make at the end of my review.

Besides the article on political philosophy, there is also one on “PoliticalScience” by Sonia Kruks. An important essay on “Economics” by Gary BrentMadison traces the relationship between the Austrian school of economicand phenomenology. A revival of this relationship, centered at George Ma-son University, has led to the formulation of a phenomenological or herme-neutical economics that sees the market as “a unique and irreplaceable meansfor discovering knowledge,” sees “prices [as] a form of embodied meaning,”and respects “the role of the entrepreneur . . . as one instantiation of the ‘act-ing person’.” It is hoped that these approaches will provide an alternative tothe discredited positivist, Keynsian economics that was based on a Cartesianunderstanding of both social science and the self, where the economic agentwas interpreted as “a robot-like entity that . . . is nothing more than a calcu-

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lating utility maximizer.” There is an entry on “Feminism” by Mary JeanneLarrabee, which chronicles the stages of feminist thought in this century,describes the work of many contemporary thinkers, and considers themes inphenomenology that are of interest to feminism.

Timothy Casey contributes an entry on “Architecture” that draws onHeidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Karsten Harries, and others. He claims that thereturn to the lifeworld, with its emphasis on body and place as opposed to theCartesian uniform grid, permits a revival of the Vitruvian principles ofvenustas, utilitas, and firmitas. It provides an alternative to the utilitarianismand formalism of modern thinking (in which a building is conceived, in Har-ries’ phrase, as a “decorated shed”) and the arbitrariness of postmodernism.Forms of architecture are distinguished (the monumental versus the domes-tic, for example), and architecture is said to have “an ethical task to expressand reinforce” the way of life of a people. “Theater” is treated in an essay byJames M. Edie that draws primarily on Sartre, “Dance” is discussed by Eliza-beth A. Behnke and Maureen Connolly, “Film” by Vivian Sobchack, “Litera-ture” by Michael McDuffie, “Music” by Lawrence Ferrara and Elizabeth A.Behnke. Richard M. Zaner contributes a long entry on “Medicine,” whichexplores not only the states of health and illness but also problems of inter-pretation that occur in diagnosis, the manner in which illness is expressed inthe body and in action, and the asymmetrical relationship of healer and healed.“Nursing” is discussed by John R. Scudder Jr. and Anne H. Bishop, “Psy-chiatry” by Osborne P. Wiggins and Michael Alan Schwartz, and “Psychoa-nalysis” by Herman Drüe. I would like to mention a cluster of entries on“Ethnology” (James Wiener), “Ecology” (Ullrich Melle), “Deep Ecology”(Michael E. Zimmerman), and “Behavioral Geography” (David Seamon),all of which are related to environmental issues.

Two thoughts come to mind at the end of this review. First, this volume isnot only an encyclopedia but also a treasury, displaying the great philosophicalwealth that has been accumulated in the phenomenological movement overthe past century. And the dramatis personae is so impressive: there is suchcolor, variety, and character in this tradition. It offers a marvelous communityto be associated with. Second, the relative absence of political philosophy isstriking. In Plato and Aristotle philosophy arises from and is permeated by thequestion of the political good, but here the question is almost unasked. Thisabsence is a feature of late modernity, which thinks that the political questionhas been settled and institutionalized in the modern state and that the philo-sophical issues that remain belong to the theory of knowledge and personalethics. But the problem of evidencing and truth must be stated not only inregard to science, individual decision, and the lifeworld, but also in regard tothe human good in political society and the opinions that are held concerningit. Reason, politics, and philosophy are not just accidentally related.

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The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology is not a conclusion to this philo-sophical movement but a resource for new beginnings. It is like a well-stockednatural preserve, rewarding both the hunter and the browser. You will easilyfind whatever you are looking for, and you will often be surprised by whatyou encounter.

Robert SokolowskiThe Catholic University of America

Washington, USA