The Foundationalist Conflict in Husserl’s Rationalism

Abstract

On pain of contradiction, Husserl cannot simultaneously maintain two of his central theses. He cannot both claim that apodicticity is the only acceptable standard of evidence for any philosophy that would be a rigorous science and concurrently maintain that philosophy must be free from aprioristic assumptions/presuppositions about its systematic final structure. I will show in this paper why this conjunction is a dilemma for Husserl and how he had three options for resolving it. Of the three, the one he chose most violated the spirit of his phenomeno-logical method and the one he should have chosen most violated his notion of philosophy/phenomenology as a rigorous science. My conclusion is that Heidegger was quite correct in claiming that phenomenology can only be practiced hermeneutically.