Transcendental Phenomenology as the Project of Ultimate Elucidation

Abstract

AbstractWe have seen that Husserl considers phenomenology to be First Philosophy, the ultimate science. For Husserl, this means that phenomenology must clarify the ultimate phenomenological-epistemological principle that leads to ultimate elucidation. But what is this ultimate principle and what does ultimate elucidation mean? It is the aim of this chapter to answer these questions. In Sect. 12.2, we shall discuss what role Husserl’s principle of all principles can play in the quest for ultimate elucidation and what it means for a principle to be ultimately elucidating (letztaufklärend) and ultimately elucidated (letztaufgeklärt). We will see that the Husserlian thesis that originary presentive intuitions are an immediate and the ultimate source of justification qualifies as the ultimate epistemological principle. To be sure, the objective of this chapter is not mainly interpretive. Instead, we shall see how our phenomenological-epistemological system established in the course of the present work can be systematically completed in the sense of shown to be ultimately elucidating and ultimately elucidated in a precise sense specified in this chapter. Chaps. 11 and 12 are closely connected. In the previous chapter, we saw that fundamental epistemological principles can be immediately intuited. In the present chapter, we will see that this is the key for establishing transcendental phenomenology as the ultimate science.