ABSTRACT
The phenomenological analyses that trace phenomena to their source in the transcendental intentionality of absolute consciousness are called by Edmund Husserl 'constitutive', and phenomenology as a whole is defined by the project of tracing all 'constituted' meaning to the source. The ambiguity of the status of the intentional object, as both the immanent content of the act of intentionality and as this act's extra psychic and therefore transcendent referent, is resolved in one bold stroke with Husserl's formulation of the phenomenological reduction. Indeed, this Descartes' presupposition occurs first in Aristotle, and it occurs within the context of Aristotle's critique of the status of the phenomenon in Plato's philosophy. The philosophical proximity to Aristotle's notion of the phantasma of Husserl's presupposition that the transcendental phenomenon is of a nature to establish the truth of the being of something does not, to be sure, suggest that Aristotle conceived anything remotely approaching the specific task Husserl sets for transcendental phenomenology.
