HUSSERL’S CONTEXTUALIST THEORY OF TRUTH

Abstract

In the following article I wanted to draw attention to some features of Edmund Husserl’s theory of evidence and truth. I tried to show that if we have a closer look on what he said about the nature of experience and cognition, we see, how current and actual author he is, even in the beginning of the 21st Century. Many authors in Husserl’s own time, and long after Husserl, considered him to be a late representative of traditional, modernist metaphysics: as idealist, Foundationalist, intellectualist, etc. The publication of Husserl vast unpublished manuscripts discarded such charges evidently, but even the detailed, more attentive and caution reading of his published works (or works, which were prepared for publication), shows such charges as highly problematic. What I would like to highlight in this article: is the contextualist character of Husserl’s understanding of evidence and truth, of knowledge and Being. That means: every insight and every entity fits into a wider context of further experiences, insights and entities. This conception characterized in him every level of experience and knowledge: 1) everyday experiences, 2) scientific and 3) philosophical cognition. Evidence is on every level is fundamentally open and contextual – whose correlation is an essentially organic reality. Husserl with such formulations says something very similar what we could find under the title of “epistemic contextualism” in contemporary analytic philosophy. The second main thesis of my essay (next to the contextual character of evidence), is that Husserl’s stance in this question might serve as a fruitful field of dialogue between phenomenology and analytic philosophy.