The Phenomenological Elucidation of Truth: Between Skepticism and Relativism

Abstract

Husserl’s most comprehensive efforts to overcome relativism are in the end inseparable from the larger project of establishing phenomenology as a foundational discipline. The starting-point of this project is the conviction, in the tradition of Descartes and Brentano, that intuition is the ultimate source of all knowledge and certainty.1 Initially Husserl’s aim is to make clear the basis in intuition of knowledge in the specific fields of arithmetic (Philosophy of Arithmetic) and logic (Logical Investigations). This more limited project leads to the elaboration of a general intuitionist epistemology and Evidenz-theory of truth; that is, to a systematization of the initial guiding conviction that intuition is the ground of all knowledge. At this early stage (i.e., through the first edition of the Logical Investigations), Husserl uncritically combines his intuitionism with a realist, Cartesian-style ontology inherited from Brentano. However, as the inconsistencies of this combination become clear, the definitive outlines of the project take shape. The guiding aim becomes twofold: to establish a discipline which will found the sciences while itself fulfilling the demand for Evidenz (truth) to the highest degree; and in so doing to perfect the overcoming of the Cartesian conception of truth and reality.