Dorion Cairns – Författare

This multilingual glossary is a guide for translating writings by Edmund RusserI into English. It has been compiled and improved in the course of about thirty years for my own guidance. Its initial pur­ pose and the tests it has undergone in use have determined its contents. The translations I have made are far from being limited to those I have published or intend to publish. As I read and translate more, occasions will doubtless arise to include more expressions in the glossary and to improve the lists of English renderings I shall thenceforth use. The glossary is given the present title and submitted now for publication because numerous experts have said it would be useful not only to other translators of HusserI but also to his readers generally. For a translation of such writings as RusserI's the guidance offered by ordinary bilingual dictionaries is inadequate in opposite respects. On the one hand, there are easily translatable expressions for which numerous such dictionaries offer too many equivalent renderings. On the other hand, there are difficultly translatable expressions that any such dictionary either fails to translate at all or else translates by expressions none of which fit the sense. In following such dictionaries a translator must therefore practise consistency on the one hand and ingenuity on the other. Hence the need for a written glossary such as this one.

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.

This comprehensive appraisal of one of the greatest and most influential philosophers of the 20th century results from Dorion Cairns's remarkable association with Husserl, informed by a close personal relationship with the thinker that spanned some three years.

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.