ABSTRACT
In a lecture series delivered in February of 1929 at the Sorbonne, Edmund Husserl introduced his philosophy of transcendental phenomenology to France. Phenomenology would instead accede to the true spirit of a genuine philosophy. For Husserl, the phenomenological question of self is entwined with the issue of philosophical method. Taken in the phenomenological sense, the world is the ultimate horizon against which everything that could appear in fact appears, including the abstract and theoretical natural scientific understandings of the world as physical nature. The parallels with Rene Descartes are again striking. Equally daunting circumstances had given rise to Descartes's quest for a first philosophy. According to Husserl himself, no one in the history of philosophy had as yet properly formulated the right attitude until him. Genuine philosophical reflection gets underway, he explains, by paying heed to our conscious rapport with things.
