Gerda Walther - Böcker

This is the first full-text English translation of a seminal book within the phenomenological movement. The work was orginally published in 1922 in Edmund Husserl’s yearbook Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, and has had a wide impact on work in phenomenology (Husserl, Heideger, Stein) and social ontology. Gerda Walther broaches the topic of social ontology, i.e., a study of social communities. She carries out this task by using the phenomenological method, that is, a study of the first-person (both singular and plural) experience of being a part of a community, what it feels like internally (and its constitutive elements), how it relates to other individuals or other communities, and how unifications between individiuals and communities or between communities take place. The book is an important contribution to the phenomenology of intersubjectivity or the study of social ontology. Social ontology has been an important and fruitful field of research in contemporary social theory, cognitive science, and other disciplines. It will be a crucial contribution to current research. Also available as paperback: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/isbn/9783110764857/html

Mystical experience continues to fascinate human beings across different cultures and traditions. Deploying the phenomenological method, Gerda Walther’s Phenomenology of Mysticism explores the conditions that make mystical experience possible, that is, how it is that human beings make sense of mystical phenomena. Unlike historical and anthropological sudies of mysticism across cultures, Walther maintains that to phenomenlogically grasp the sense of mystical experience certain conditions must obtain: All encounters with a living divinity require the relating subject to be configured as a human person consituted as a lived unity of body, psyche, and what Walther calls a fundamental essence or spirit. Without such a configuration of the human person, unique intersubjective experiences with a divinity prove impossible. For Walther, such personal relations lay the ground for human interiorty to encounter God and the uniqueness of God to become manifest to human beings. Without Walther’s personal structure, encounter with and understanding what a divinity reveals cannot be expereinced. Walther presents the subjective and intersubjective elements that make mystical experience possible.

This is the first full-text English translation of a seminal book within the phenomenological movement.The work was orginally published in 1922 in Edmund Husserl’s yearbook Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, and has had a wide impact on work in phenomenology (Husserl, Heideger, Stein) and social ontology. Gerda Walther broaches the topic of social ontology, i.e., a study of social communities. She carries out this task by using the phenomenological method, that is, a study of the first-person (both singular and plural) experience of being a part of a community, what it feels like internally (and its constitutive elements), how it relates to other individuals or other communities, and how unifications between individiuals and communities or between communities take place. The book is an important contribution to the phenomenology of intersubjectivity or the study of social ontology. Social ontology has been an important and fruitful field of research in contemporary social theory, cognitive science, and other disciplines. It will be a crucial contribution to current research.