This is a translation of Edmund HusserI's lecture course from the Summer semester 1907 at the University of Gottingen. The German original was pub lished posthumously in 1973 as Volume XVI of Husserliana, Husserl's opera omnia. The translation is complete, including both the main text and the supplementary texts (as Husserliana volumes are usually organized), except for the critical apparatus which provides variant readings. The announced title of the lecture course was 'Main parts of the phenome nology and critique of reason.' The course began with five, relatively inde pendent, introductory lectures. These were published on their own in 1947, bearing the title The idea ojphenomenology.l The 'Five Lectures' comprise a general orientation by proposing the method to be employed in the subsequent working out of the actual problems (viz., the method of 'phenomenological reduction') and by clarifying, at least provisionally, some technical terms that will be used in the labor the
