Transcendental idealism and the Copernican turn in Kant and Husserl

Abstract

In this chapter, I elucidate the essential features of Husserl’s critique of Kant, in order to reassess the specific meaning of Husserl’s transcendental idealism in relation to Kant’s idealism. Husserl in fact interprets the Copernican turn in a two-fold manner – positive and negative. Positively speaking, the Copernican turn consists in the disclosing of transcendental subjectivity as the absolute origin of every sense and being. Negatively speaking, the Copernican turn consists in the thesis that the a priori structure of knowable objects are governed by those of the knowing subject. In the chapter I develop the consequences of Husserl’s critique of this second meaning of the Copernican turn: rejection of the thing in itself and an intuitus originarius, the making absolute of the mode of givenness of objects of any type, and the recusation of any factual pre-constitution of the transcendental subject.