ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how Edmund Husserl tackles relativism. It begins by briefly outlining phenomenologists’ overall attitude towards relativism. For this purpose, I introduce a basic conceptual distinction in the first part: subject-relatedness vs. subject-dependence. The second part of this chapter specifies three strategies of responding to the challenge of relativism: refuting, undermining and bypassing relativist ideas and theses. The third part presents the main lines of reasoning for refuting and undermining skeptical and relativist theories Husserl develops in his Logical Investigations (henceforth LI). Although Husserl broadens his phenomenological perspective, he nonetheless sticks to the main anti-skeptical and anti-relativist arguments of LI. Here I can only discuss a few lines of thought from Husserl’s later work; these are his arguments against relativism in the domain of ethics and value theory. To this end, the fourth part of my chapter discusses Husserl’s rebuttal, in his Lecture Courses on Ethics 1920–1924, of social-consensus theories and hedonism. As we shall see, with regard to both issues, the distinction between subject-relatedness and subject-dependence is of utmost importance. The fifth part summarizes the results with a view to the three strategies introduced earlier.
