The Subject in Question: Sartre's Critique of Husserl in The Transcendence of the Ego

The Subject in Questionprovides a fascinating insight into a debate between two of the twentieth century's most famous philosophers over the key notions of conscious experience and the self. Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, argued that the unity of one's own consciousness depends on the "transcendental ego," an irreducible, essential self not available to ordinary consciousness. But inThe Transcendence of the Ego, Jean-Paul Sartre launched a sustained attack on Husserl's doctrine and argued that the self is instead a construct, a product of one's self-image in the eyes of others. In this first book-length commentary on Sartre's influential work, Stephen Priest explores Sartre's hostility to any essentialist conception of the self and sheds new light on the debates over consciousness, the legacy of Descartes and Kant, the nature of selfhood and personal identity, and the development of the phenomenological tradition.

Stephen Priest is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a Visiting Scholar of Wolfson College, Oxford.