On phenomenology and the attempt to ground a rigorous science

Abstract

The text discusses Edmund Husserl's attempt to found philosophy as a rigorous science. It relies on the Cartesian Meditations and reconstructs the genealogy of the phenomenological method from the philosophy of Descartes, in which the first great modern attempt to found philosophy as first science is identified. It examines Husserl's diagnosis of the loss of the unity of philosophy in the face of a fragmentary philosophical literature, the proposal to resume Cartesian radicalism in new Meditationes de prima philosophia, the recourse to hyperbolic doubt and to the epoché as the suspension of all knowledge liable to doubt, and the distinction between the pure ego reached by Cartesianism and the transcendental ego, presented as the limit of Descartes's philosophy. The text holds that the transcendental ego, understood as a structure common to all human consciousness, makes subjectivity the ground of knowledge and allows the overcoming both of the doubt as to the existence of the world and of the doubt as to the existence of other consciousnesses.