Volume 33 (2022): Issue 1 (September 2022)

This paper is concerned with the reappraisal of Husserl’s ontology and epistemology, sketched in book one of Ideen. The main issue is Husserl’s theory of essence and essential insight. I present the fundamental distinction between facts and essences, and, over and above it, Husserl’s defense of an a priori knowledge based on essential insight as well as his partition of the whole realm of a priori knowledge into a formal set of material, regional ontologies. I will show how the theory of essential insight presented in Ideen gives rise to several criticisms, namely those made by Neo-Kantians, like Rickert and Natorp. In the last part, I will show how the mathematical concept of an invariant under a group of variations was the leading case for Husserl’s mature notion of eidetic insight.

I here present and discuss Husserl’s clarification of the genesis of modern empirical science, particularly its mathematical methods, as presented in his last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Although Husserl’s analyses have as their goal to redirect science to the lifeworld and to reposition man and his immediate experiences at the foundation of the scientific project so as to overcome the “crisis” of science, I approach them from a different perspective. The problem that interests me here is the applicability of mathematics in empirical science, to assess Husserl’s treatment of this issue in order to see if it can be sustained from a strictly scientific point of view regardless of philosophical adequacy. My conclusion is that it cannot. What Husserl takes as the “crisis” of science is inherent to the best scientific methodology.

In the first part of my paper, we will journey through the general structure of the first volume of Ideas, from which we will be able to deduce the position of Volume II. After carrying out a general analysis of the noesis/noema correlation structure in Section III and having provided, in Section IV, the basics of a phenomenology of reason, the second volume of Ideas should study the general fields in which the objects of transcendental experience appear: the world, the animal being, and the spiritual or cultural being. The third, unwritten volume should have been devoted to the study of the superior products of culture, and science. Thus, the second part of this paper will show the place of Ideas’ second volume. The third part, the decisive one, will inquire into the position of the world and the place of the body and culture. Specifically, it will ask whether the experience of the body is understood to be an objective genitive or whether it is also understood, necessarily, as a subjective genitive. The same question will be asked about culture. An understanding of one as objective or subjective genitive radically alters the meaning of the pure ego.

In this paper, I address Husserl’s theory of intentionality focusing on the problems of attention. I claim that without phenomenological reduction the specific phenomenological content of modalizations – in intentional acts – would be hard to explain. It would be impossible to understand why constant external factors (for instance, variations in the intensity of a stimulus) are accompanied by fluctuations in attention. It would also be impossible to understand the reasons why only the lived experience of causality – which I sharply distinguish from causality in the psychophysical sense of the term – transforms attention into a factor that allows the understanding of a situation by the subject who lives that experience. I claim at last that only the genetic analysis of Husserl’s late Freiburg period, with its distinction between primary and secondary attention, gives a full account of the relation between the thematic object, focused on an intentional attentive act, and the horizon that surrounds the object and gives it its ultimate meaning.

This article analyses the fundamental relationship between Husserl’s theory of reflection in the first volume of Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and the two main concepts upon which transcendental phenomenology is grounded: namely, description and reduction. Although the concept of reflection was already used in Logical Investigations, Husserl revised it entirely thanks to his analysis of time-consciousness in the 1905 Lectures. Reflection thus appears as a key concept in understanding the ‘turn’ that led Husserl to deeply modify his descriptive method in order to move to transcendental phenomenology.

This paper reads Husserl’s phenomenology as an attempt to solve the crisis of our civilization. It is well known that for him the deep roots of this crisis are related to a misunderstanding of the idea of rationality that leads to skepticism and relativism. It is also well known that in order to overcome this situation Husserl will propound a new idea of reason and rationality that will supposedly fulfill the old dream with which philosophy was born in Greece: To be episteme, rigorous science valid at all times and in all places. Taking this general thesis into account, the paper will defend that Husserl is a foundationalist thinker and that the idea of philosophy as strenge Wissenschaft is present throughout his whole work, including, of course, Ideen I. This in some way “classic” interpretation tries to discuss other recent ways of understanding the whole Husserlian project, particularly Dan Zahavi’s reading, in which the foundationalist position is downplayed.