This English translation of Gebser’s major work, Ursprung und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlag, 1966), offers certain fundamental insights which should be beneficial to any sensitive scientist and makes it available to the English-speaking world for the recognition it deserves.

“The path which led Gebser to his new and universal perception of the world is, briefly, as follows. In the wake of materialism and social change, man had been described in the early years of our century as the “dead end” of nature. Freud had redefined culture as illness—a result of drive sublimation; Klages had called the spirit (and he was surely speaking of the hypertrophied intellect) the “adversary of the soul,” propounding a return to a life like that of the Pelasgi, the aboriginal inhabitants of Greece; and Spengler had declared the “Demise of the West” during the years following World War I. The consequences of such pessimism continued to proliferate long after its foundations had been superseded.

It was with these foundations—the natural sciences—that Gebser began. As early as Planck it was known that matter was not at all what materialists had believed it to be, and since 1943 Gebser has repeatedly emphasized that the so-called crisis of Western culture was in fact an essential restructuration.…

Gebser has noted two results that are of particular significance: first, the abandonment of materialistic determinism, of a one-sided mechanistic-causal mode of thought; and second, a manifest “urgency of attempts to discover a universal way of observing things, and to overcome the inner division of contemporary man who, as a result of his one-sided rational orientation, thinks only in dualisms.”

Against this background of recent discoveries and conclusions in the natural sciences Gebser discerned the outlines of a potential human universality. He also sensed the necessity to go beyond the confines of this first treatise so as to include the humanities (such as political economics and sociology) as well as the arts in a discussion along similar lines. This was the point of departure of The Ever-Present Origin.

From In memoriam Jean Gebser by Jean Keckeis

Existential philosophy has perhaps captured the public imagination more completely than any other philosophical movement in the twentieth century. But less is known about the phenomenological method lying behind existentialism. In this solid introduction to phenomenological philosophy, authors David Stewart and Algis Mickunas show that phenomenology is neither new nor bizarre but is a contemporary way of raising afresh the major problems of philosophy that have dominated the traditions of Western thought. The authors carefully lead the reader trough the maze of terminology, explaining the major problems phenomenology has treated and showing how these are a consistent extension of the traditional concerns of philosophy.

In concise, uncluttered, and straightforward terms, the history, development, and contemporary status of phenomenology is explained with a copiously annotated bibliography following each chapter. Nothing in print combines the extensive introductory materials with a guide to the massive literature that has been produced by phenomenological and existential studies.

The central contribution of Ströker’s investigations is a careful and strict analysis of the relationship between experienced space, Euclidean space, and non-Euclidean spaces. Her study begins with the question of experienced space, inclusive of mood space, space of action and perception, of practical activities and bodily orientations, and ends with the controversies of the proponents of geometric and mathematical understanding of space. Within the context of experienced space, Ströker includes historical discussions of place, topology, depth, perspectivity, homogeneity, orientation, and the questions of empty and full spaces. Her investigation concludes that any strict analysis of space must be founded upon an unavoidable ontology.

Philosophical Investigations of Space addresses a number of methodological controversies. It tests the limitations of a variety of scientific, phenomenological, geometric, and logical methods in order to demonstrate limitations of both methodology and underlying assumption. In addition to the richness of her historical and systematic discussion, Ströker’s work is a model of thoroughly documented philosophical scholarship and conceptual precision.