How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

I am thinking of the intellectual project of the Jewish German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and the school of thought that he spawned, often called the phenomenological tradition, since it concerns itself with philosophical reflection on the “appearances” (phenomena) of consciousness and attempts to get at the essence or structure of this consciousness beyond or before all such appearances, including and especially sensory, cognitive, scientific, and mathematical ones. Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are generally referenced as inheritors, although none of them really took up Husserl’s “transcendental phenomenology.”