Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was one of the most important Czecho- Austro- German philosophers of the twentieth century. Considered the founding father of phenomenology, the study of the construction of subjective experience and consciousness, Husserl's philosophy has infl uenced and been modifi ed in the work of distinguished thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean- Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau- Ponty. In a career in which he wrote voluminously for over half a century, the eff ect that Husserl's prolifi c contributions to philosophy have had upon technological, textual and cultural hermeneutics is extraordinary. He composed numerous signifi cant essays and books that interrogate the traditional philosophical concerns: mathematics, science, ethics, logic, epistemology, cognitive science, ontology, space and time. There are also several key lectures and texts that were published posthumously, such as The Paris Lectures (1998) and The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1970), which was Husserl's fi nal endeavour to clarify and establish his phenomenological philosophy. Arguably, though, the most infl uential works appeared during Husserl's lifetime, including Logical Investigations (2001), Ideas (1983) and Cartesian Meditations (1977). Transcendental phenomenology, the study of the essential structures of pure consciousness, is the one discovery that Husserl would have wanted to be most remembered for. This is for him the authentic path of philosophy where he envisioned a community of co- workers interchanging phenomenological perspectives.

One such co- worker and phenomenologist is, of course, Virilio, whose immersion in Husserl's ideas has become increasingly evident as a set of motifs that run through his oeuvre. Indeed, Virilio integrates a number of critical Husserlian issues concerning the eff ects of technology in presentday societies, in particular the exploration of the potential loss of human presence, activity and experience in a world that is becoming ever more technologically determined.