ABSTRACT
Edmund Husserl’s interest was in consciousness, and his main bequest to posterity was a phenomenological psychology. As Husserl affirmed, intentionality is the fundamental characteristic of consciousness. That is to say, there can be no consciousness that is not directed upon an object. Jean-Paul Sartre is opposed to any attempt to eliminate either the subject or object by absorbing it in the other. His phenomenology is not phenomenalism, it knows nothing either of a mysterious thing-in-itself that lurks inaccessible behind phenomena or of the self of idealism that produces its own content; nor does he reduce consciousness to a mere epiphenomenon. Each retains for him its own full rights. The standpoint of Sartre and his followers can be best described as atheist humanism. It is however not always noticeably different, as far as can be seen at present, from the main Christian and liberal tradition of the West.
