Sources of knowledge

Abstract

Husserlian phenomenology is an ambitious project, aiming to be First Philosophy, the ultimate science. For Husserl, this means that for any science, indeed for any piece of knowledge, phenomenology must be capable of elucidating the legitimacy of this science or piece of knowledge. But how can phenomenology, a science of the structures of consciousness, serve as the ultimate science? To answer this question, we shed light on Husserl’s teachings on the variety, epistemic force, and systematic role of experiences. The idea, roughly, is that every piece of knowledge can be traced back to epistemically foundational experiences. To be more precise, it is experiences that bear the mark of originary givenness that play this role. Investigating the sources of knowledge, then, means investigating modes of givenness – the ways in which experiences present the objects they are directed at. Perceptual experiences, introspective experiences, eidetic intuitions, and evaluative experiences are among the various types of originary presentive experiences. In our Husserlian picture, different sources of knowledge correspond to different types of experiences, which in turn correspond to different types of evidence. It is one of the most important tasks of phenomenology to clarify these correlations.