ABSTRACT
Transcendental phenomenology differs from empirical psychology, first, because it is an eidetic science and not a science of matters of fact, and, second, because it concerns pure consciousness and not the psyche. Phenomenology thus appears as the organon of all cognition, praxis, and evaluation, and, accordingly, as the first among the philosophical sciences. Its relation to the positive sciences can be investigated, in the first place, by studying the constitution of the different regions of being in transcendental consciousness, a task that, as just said, is partly accomplished in what people now know as Ideas II and Ideas III. This chapter analyzes in detail §52 of Ideas I, which contains Husserl’s solution to the problem of the relation between the thing of perception and the thing of modern mathematical physics, thus supplementing the results of §40.
