ABSTRACT

This chapter suggests that phenomenological insight into intrinsic probabilities represents an indispensable philosophical task, which the general atmosphere of phenomenological investigation, with its stress on the absolutely necessary, has tended to make people pass over. Yet the probabilistic a priori can claim to be an inevitable extension of the strictly necessary a priori, and to be in fact the most living and interesting part of the whole a priori field. The eidetic method in philosophy can be said to be an analytic method, also a synthetic method, which throughout employs the ‘seeing eye’. The a priori probabilities of nature and of natural science are a subject of absorbing interest and almost complete non-cultivation. As long as the contingently factual is supposed alien to the necessary, a sort of verminous growth that multiplies in its precincts, there seems no reason why the necessary should have as its offshoots various necessary or a priori probabilities.