Synthesis and Backward Reference in Husserl's Logical Investigations

What does it mean to say that one experience is synthesized with others? This study is a speculative-exegetical Husserlian account of the ground, the mechanisms, and the results of synthesis. A detailed, rigorous and systematic analysis of Husserl's Logical Investigations, it argues that synthesizing consciousness must be a self-explicating system of interpretive acts driven by ongoing forward and backward references, grounding its structures as it proceeds and positing its origins as that which must have been given "in advance". It thus develops a dialectical phenomenology grounded in Husserl's largely untreated category of "referring backward". This book provides a systematic examination of synthesis in Husserl's major early work. It offers Husserl scholars a range of original interpretations on issues ranging from closed and unclosed linguistic expressions and the indeterminacy of perspective, to the ego's return to itself.