1. Aron Gurwitsch,The Field of Consciousness(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964), hereafter abbreviatedField.According to Lester Embree, this work was a product of the 1940s. For an account of the historical significance of Gurwitsch's work and a bibliography of important secondary literature, see Embree's “The Legacy of Dorion Cairns and Aron Gurwitsch: A Letter to Future Historians,”Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXVI, 1989, pp. 115–146; for an additional bibliography, see Embree's, “Bibliography: Some Recent Gurwitsch Criticism,” inJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 12, 1981, pp. 102–103.
2. In Field, p. 5, Gurwitsch writes, “We shall whenever possible choose theories advocated by James as points of departure for our analysis. We shall proceed more readily since James was much concerned with problems of organization or with problems which may easily be stated in terms of organization.” It should be stressed that Gurwitsch did not find support for his claim concerning the origin of organization in consciousness in James's work. On some other matters, however, Gurwitsch and James are close philosophically.
3. Even though Gurwitsch is not careful to distinguish the noematic from the noetic aspect of consciousness, it is clear that his argument for organization refers to the noematic aspect, that is, to the field of consciousness, to what is experienced, rather than to the noesis as the consciousness of field, as the fact of its actually being experienced. We will endeavor to avoid the ambiguity which sometimes befalls Gurwitsch's chosen terminology.
4. Gurwitsch,Field, p. 8.
5. Although James and Gurwitsch each hold that both saliency and selectivity have a role in the organization of experience, the disjunctive statement here represents Gurwitsch's conviction that only one can be considered the main, original factor in experiential organization.