1 Husserl on Understanding Persons Christian Beyer (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) In the mid 1920's, Edmund Husserl attempted to revise the second volume of his Ideas (Ideas II, posthumously published in Hua IV) for publication. The notion of understanding a person is introduced in the third section of that volume. Its significance partly owes to the fact that it sheds light on Husserl's conception of individual and communicative environment, respectively (which influenced Heidegger, among others, and constitutes a version of what is commonly referred to as his conception of the lifeworld). Furthermore, and indeed connectedly, it plays an important role in Husserl's ethics, as manifested particularly in his 1920/24 lectures Einleitung in die Ethik, recently edited by Henning Peucker. As Peucker points out in his introduction, these lectures stand in a close systematic relationship to Ideas II (cf. Hua XXXVII, p. XIV). I begin by briefly (and rather uncritically) sketching the basic idea of these lectures (section 1). Following this, I consider the connection between the respective notions of environment and understanding a person in Husserl (section 2). Finally, I highlight some important features of Husserl's empathy-based account of understanding a person, partly by comparing it to an alternative approach based on the conception of sympathy described, particularly, at the beginning of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (section 3). 1. Husserl's ethics Husserl praises Kant for rejecting the sensualistic view of moral persons as driven by passive emotional affections and for rather conceiving of them as free, self-responsible agents (Hua XXXVII, §46, pp. 232f). However, he criticizes Kant's ethics as "formalistic" (ibid., §47, p. 243), on the ground that it neglects the motivating role of "active" emotions with respect to evaluative judgements and the