Concepts of Time in Husserl

The most important question, and at the same time that which fate sometimes relieves us from having to answer (Husserl 1913a, p. 194; Husserl 1928, p. 346): so time appears in the Husserlian phenomenology. And it is precisely the crossroads between the ambition to resolve its enigmas and the fear that any effort may prove to be vain that describes in the best of ways the motive of that uninterrupted rewriting to which Husserl subjected his reflections on time, until composing, in three decades, from 1904 to 1934, the largest corpus that had been dedicated to this topic in the entire history of Western philosophy.Composed throughout the arc of three decades - at least from 1904 to 1934 - the Husserlian contributions to the phenomenology of time form the most vast corpus on this subject in the Western philosophical canon. Moved by the question regarding the origin of time, the Husserlian reflection finds three principal outlets, corresponding to as many periods of its development: a) the mathesis of the intentional varieties (1904-1911), the metaphysics of individuality (1917-1918), the theory of temporal self-constitution (1929-34). After having described their phases, sources and internal articulation, the essay will offer a brief essential vocabulary of the phenomenology of time and will survey some of the most relevant critiques addressed to it, covering the entire twentieth century in philosophy, from Heidegger to Derrida, from Bergmann to Lèvinas.