ABSTRACT
Included in the Cartesian tradition is not only the actual corpus of Descartes but also its critical reception. Husserl was acquainted with Descartes since much before the 1907 “turn” and project of a transcendental phenomenology. In Allgemeine Erkenntnistheorie, a text from 1903, Husserl had already drawn the outlines of a theory of knowledge grounded in originary evidence, while also challenging the Cartesian distinction between the subject, the object, and the mental act itself in the intuitus mentis. More than any other of Descartes’s successors, it was Leibniz who managed to challenge Cartesian objectivism and the pernicious way in which philosophy was made a servant of the science of the material world. One of the remarkable strengths of Neo-Kantian reading of Descartes is that it lays out the plan and the task of first philosophy: the search for and establishing of a general criterion of truth – the same research, that is, as the one that guides Husserl’s Third Cartesian Meditation.
