ABSTRACT
Intersubjective experience plays a decisive role in Edmund Husserl’s account of what he calls the constitution of the environment in general and of the objective spatio-temporal world in particular. The term “constitution” is often used by Husserl, especially after his “transcendental turn,” but he never really thematizes its content as such. Eugen Fink rightly describes it as an “operational concept,” one with which the author operates within his or her philosophical theorizing, without its being explicitly introduced or explained, or reflected upon, but such that the author’s use of this concept “shadows” the underlying method of philosophy. Transcendental phenomenology is a meta-epistemological project investigating into the essence and conditions for the possibility of epistemic constitution and into the essential structure of a world thus constituted as real. The essence of constitution turns out, in the course of this project, to consist in mental file processing in contexts of epistemic justification.
