Husserl and Ricoeur: around the Cartesian Meditations

Abstract

The study examines Husserl's criticism of and inspiration by Descartes' Metaphysical Meditations, as expressed in the lectures published under the title Cartesian Meditations. It follows Ricoeur's reading of that work in the articles later collected in A l'ecole de la Phenomenologie and draws on Husserl's own text to reconstruct the two methodical motifs taken from Descartes: the critique of everything that presents itself as evident and the grounding of knowledge in the self-conscious subject. It discusses Husserl's dissatisfaction with the model of science of his time, the passage from naive objectivism to transcendental subjectivism, the epoche and the reduction, which bracket the world and the empirical self and lead to the transcendental ego, and the objection of transcendental solipsism raised in the Fourth Meditation. It holds that Husserl abandons the Cartesian polarity between the cogito and the existence of God and grounds objectivity in the alter ego and in intersubjectivity, treated in the Fifth Meditation, so that transcendental phenomenology presents itself as a philosophy of meaning.