In The Transcendence of the World, Richard Holmes brings together some of the major figures in the phenomenological movement to help explain our experience of the world—the world meant as independent of any particular awareness of it. Focussing on the writings of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Holmes delivers an accessible and coherent account of both the method and results of phenomenological analysis. He offers a critical appraisal of the works of these great thinkers and presents his own radical analyses in order to make sense of our experience of the world, and also the theory of quantum mechanics that purports to describe this world.

This book will be an important resource for students and scholars of philosophy and for all those interested in twentieth-century continental ideas.

Richard Holmes has taught philosophy at the University of Waterloo since 1968. He is the author of many papers on twentieth-century European philosophy and edited Klaus Berger’s translation of Moritz Geiger’s The Significance of Art.

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''Because of Holmes's novel and revelatory analogies, and because he clarifies so well the centrality of the issue of world-constitution in Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, I believe that this slim volume would make a very useful text in upper-level course in phenomenology, where it would best be used in concert with primary source materials by those philosophers.''

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