References
- Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” trans. Quentin Lauer. Husserl: Shorter Works, ed.Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 166.
- Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 17.
- Crisis, 18.
- For examples of this reading, see the following: Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1983). 16–20: Charles B. Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 148: Gary E. Overvold, “The Foundationalist Conflict in Husserl's Rationalism.” Analecta Husserliana, Volume XXXIV, ed.Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991). 441–454; and Herman Philipse, “Transcendental Idealism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed.Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 239–322. For reasons I explain below, the philosophers who criticize Husserl's foundationalism are in fact much more numerous than those who explicitly call him a foundationalist.
- John Drummond, Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), 239.
- William P. Alston, “Foundationalism,” in A Companion to Epistemology. ed.Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 145.
- Examples of the latter include James Mensch, After Modernity: Husserlian Reflections on a Philosophical Tradition (Albany: SUN Y Press, 1996) and Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
- Alvin Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate (New York: Oxford University Press. 1993), 3.
- Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate. 5.
- Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate. 68.
- This is not inconsistent with Husserl's claim in the Cartesian Meditations that phenomenology “does no violence to the problem-motives that inwardly drive the old tradition into the wrong line of inquiry and the wrong method: and it by no means professes to stop short of the ‘supreme and ultimate’ questions.” See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991). 156. Granted. Husserl might say that his work does pursue the same goals as other, more traditional branches of philosophy, including more mainstream epistemology. But if his work does address mainstream epistemological questions, it addresses them only indirectly, in so far as these questions can be clarified and reformulated through phenomenology. In other words, Husserl might not say that mainstream epistemology is entirely misguided, but he would say that it is possible only as a branch of phenomenology. For Husserl, I take it, epistemology is possible only as the attempt to fix the sense of epistemological concepts and to clarify them phenomenologically. To the extent that most analytic epistemologists would disagree, their goals and presuppositions are inconsistent with Husserl's.
- Drummond, Husserlian Intentionality, 239.
- Drummond, Husserlian Intentionality, 239.
- Drummond, Husserlian Intentionality, 240.
- Cartesian Meditations. 14.
- “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” 167.
- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 276.
- Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1982), 17.
- Ideas, 18.
- Crisis, 44.
- See, for instance, this passage from The Origin of Geometry: “In the finally immense proliferation of a science like geometry, what has become of the claim and the capacity for reactivation? When every researcher works on his part of the building, what of the vocational interruptions and time out for rest, which cannot be overlooked here? When he returns to the actual continuation of work, must he first run through the whole immense chain of groundings back to the original premises and actually reactivate the whole thing? If so, a science like our modern geometry would obviously not be possible at all.” (Crisis, 363, my emphasis.)
- Ideas, 44.
- One might well question my strategy of searching for the marks of foundationalism in the Ideas. It would obviously be impractical to scour all Husserl's writings for the two marks; we must look in some texts rather than others. And it seems to me that of all Husserl's works, the Ideas is the most foundationalist. For one thing, it is in the Ideas that Husserl takes his hardest line on the apodicticity of phenomenological insights. His later writings, especially the Cartesian Meditations, qualify his views on apodicticity in important ways. Further, the Ideas presents Husserl at his most ahistorical. Husserl insists in this work that the meaning-structures uncovered by phenomenology are in no way shaped by historical or cultural forces, let alone relative to them. “It may well be,” he famously writes, “that we have inherited cognitive dispositions from cognitions of past generations; but…the histories of these heritages are as indifferent as the history of gold is for the value of our gold” (Ideas, 46). The “historicist” turn in later writings such as the Crisis leave far less room for bedrock truths than does the Ideas. Husserl comes closer to foundationalism in the Ideas than in his other texts. So if he is not a foundationalist even in the Ideas, then a fortiori, he is not one anywhere else.
- Ideas, 65.
- Ideas, 167.
- I borrow this term from Julian Roberts, The Logic of Reflection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 185.
- Ideas, 79.
- Ideas, 94.
- Ideas, 96.
- Ideas, 96.
- Ideas, 96.
- Ideas, 102–103.
- Ideas, 153.
- Ideas, 154.
- Ideas, 153. My emphasis.
- Ideas, 199.
- Ideas, 199.
- Ideas, 199. My emphasis.
- Ideas, 74.
- Ideas, 153.
- “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” 167.
- “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” 167.
- Once we see that reflection is not intended to generate certainties, it is easier to set aside some common misinterpretations of the epoché. The epoché is often seen as a tool for reaching certainty. It is easy, the story goes, to err when making claims about the extramental world. But if we bracket that world and confine ourselves to describing experience, we can rest assured that our claims are certain. Husserl probably encourages interpretations like this, when he compares the epoché to Cartesian doubt. But if the reading I have offered is correct, there is no reason to think Husserl sees eidetic intuition as a quest for absolute certainties, or the epoché as a tool for achieving it. On the contrary, there is good reason to think that the epoché has nothing to do with the certainty or uncertainty of our beliefs, that it is not intended to suspend our intrinsically fallible claims about what really exists. Husserl says that in the epoché, “we have not lost anything but rather have gained the whole of absolute being” (Ideas, 113). He also says that through the epoché, “we do not in any respect alter our convictions” about the external world (Ideas, 59). The epoché is not a way of fleeing into the certainties of transcendental subjectivity. It is just a way of shifting the phenomenologist's attention away from the objects of experience and towards experiencings themselves, a way of making “‘pure’ consciousness, and subsequently the whole phenomenological region, accessible to us” (Ideas, 66).
- The Origin of Geometry, in Crisis, 354.
- Crisis, 356.
- Crisis, 369.
- Crisis, 355.
- Crisis, 356. “Accessible to all” is the operative phrase here. For Husserl, mathematical claims are objective in that they are inter-subjective, and not just valid for the geometer intuiting them. “The Pythagorean theorem,” he points out, “exists only once, no matter how often or even in what language it may be expressed” (357).
- Crisis, 361.
- Crisis, 363.
- Crisis, 363.
- Crisis, 362.
- Crisis, 361.
- Crisis, 358.
- Crisis, 359.
- Crisis, 365.
- Crisis, 365.
- Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Phenomenological Movement.” Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans, and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 175.
- David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 32.
- Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 159.
- Paul Ricoeur, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics.” From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blarney and John B. Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 25–52.
- Ricoeur, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” 29.
- Ricoeur, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” 33.
- Ricoeur, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” 35.
- Ricoeur, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” 35.
- Jean Grondin, Sources of Hermeneutics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 35.
- Grondin, Sources of Hermeneutics, 35.
- Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and to the Canadian Philosophical Association. I am grateful to Phillip Buckley, Frederick Crosson, Peter Harris, and Stephen Watson, who made helpful comments an earlier versions of this paper. I am also grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which funded my research on this article through a doctoral fellowship.