ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some central features of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. The guiding thread is the transcendental reduction, which involves an ambiguity that Husserl never ceased to ponder and has continued to engage Husserl scholars. The ambiguity appears when Husserl attributes “absolute” status to consciousness – the “intentional correlation” between act and object – and it concerns the meaning and scope of the evidence to which phenomenological reflection appeals in this attribution. I will mainly draw on texts where Husserl explains how his transcendental phenomenology differs from Kant’s Critical philosophy, and I will generally let Husserl speak for himself. I will take no stand on the adequacy of Husserl’s Kant-interpretation, but I will try to clarify what is at stake. Section one introduces the issue with a look at Husserl’s “breakthrough” to phenomenology in Logical Investigations. Section two discusses the phenomenological reduction, highlighting Husserl’s “Cartesian way” of motivating it. This will lead us to consider the relation between transcendental phenomenology and ontology in section three. Finally, section four elucidates the fundamental ambiguity of the reduction: the relation between transcendental phenomenology and metaphysics. With reference to some contemporary debates, I argue that transcendental phenomenology can, and should, be metaphysically neutral.
