A Contrastive Analysis of Descartes’ Methodic Doubt and Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology

Abstract

This work is expository, analytic, critical and evaluative in its methodology. Admittedly, both thinkers were dualists. But, where Descartes turned out to be a dualist in the stronger sense, Husserl had brought the Ego closer to the objects it perceives, constituting them through intentionality. More specifically, through h the intertwinement between the intentional act and the intentional object. The goal of Descartes’ method was to arrive at an inconcussum quid, at something which cannot be subjected to doubt: his own existence as a thinking substance, in addition to the proof(s) of the existence of God. So, he methodically doubted all the things he had been certain about, in order to reaffirm their existence. Husserl’s method, on the other hand, employs what is sometimes seen as a twofold approach: phenomenological ἐποχή, (epoche) or “suspension of belief,” and phenomenological reduction. Husserl’s main philosophical problem had nothing to do with being certain about reality. He understood our certitude about reality as a basic fact of our everyday experience, as something to be taken at face value. Therefore, he did not need to doubt whether reality is as it seems to be, or even exists at all. Although there are many ways to explain Husserl’s main issue, but to take the epistemological route, the one he took in his first public communication on this topic, The idea of phenomenology, it pertains to the manner in which exterior objectivity, as something whose existence transcends the subject, can reach an immanent subject.