ABSTRACT
Edmund Husserl came to intellectual maturity at a time when philosophy was coming to be viewed with considerable disdain and suspicion. This discredit extended not only to the way philosophy had been traditionally written and discussed, especially in the worst of its "Romantic excess" among the German idealists, but to the very purpose of philosophy as a subject matter, whatever its style. The basic distinction between empirical and philosophical questions has been a leitmotif of twentieth-century philosophy. Though Husserl always called Franz Brentano his only real teacher, he came to reject Brentano's conception upon reaching philosophical independence. Psychology studies this property of reference, aboutness, or content as present internally within consciousness. Husserl's project is audacious since it is precisely this trick of converting first-person authority about internal mental states into support for claims about the external world that had eluded the philosophical tradition of epistemological "internalism" beginning with Descartes.
