Edmund Husserl
The elaboration of phenomenology

Some years after the 1900–1901 publication of his main work, the Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations), Husserl made some key conceptual elaborations which led him to assert that to study the structure of consciousness, one would have to distinguish between the act of consciousness and the phenomena at which it is directed (the objects as intended). Knowledge of essences would only be possible by " bracketing " all assumptions about the existence of an external world. This procedure he called " epoché ". These new concepts prompted the publication of the Ideen (Ideas) in 1913, in which they were at first incorporated, and a plan for a second edition of the Logische Untersuchungen.

From the Ideen onward, Husserl concentrated on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. The metaphysical problem of establishing the reality of what people perceive, as distinct from the perceiving subject, was of little interest to Husserl in spite of his being a transcendental idealist. Husserl proposed that the world of objects—and of ways in which people direct themselves toward and perceive those objects—is normally conceived of in what he called the "natural attitude", which is characterized by a belief that objects exist distinct from the perceiving subject and exhibit properties that people see as emanating from them (this attitude is also called physicalist objectivism). Husserl proposed a radical new phenomenological way of looking at objects by examining how people, in their many ways of being intentionally directed toward them, actually "constitute" them (to be distinguished from materially creating objects or objects merely being figments of the imagination); in the Phenomenological standpoint, the object ceases to be something simply "external" and ceases to be seen as providing indicators about what it is, and becomes a grouping of perceptual and functional aspects that imply one another under the idea of a particular object or "type". The notion of objects as real is not expelled by phenomenology, but "bracketed" as a way in which people regard objects — instead of a feature that inheres in an object's essence founded in the relation between the object and the perceiver. To better understand the world of appearances and objects, phenomenology attempts to identify the invariant features of how objects are perceived and pushes attributions of reality into their role as an attribution about the things people perceive (or an assumption underlying how people perceive objects). The major dividing line in Husserl's thought is the turn to transcendental idealism.

In a later period, Husserl began to wrestle with the complicated issues of intersubjectivity, specifically, how communication about an object can be assumed to refer to the same ideal entity (Cartesian Meditations, Meditation V). Husserl tries new methods of bringing his readers to understand the importance of phenomenology to scientific inquiry (and specifically to psychology) and what it means to "bracket" the natural attitude. The Crisis of the European Sciences is Husserl's unfinished work that deals most directly with these issues. In it, Husserl for the first time attempts a historical overview of the development of Western philosophy and science, emphasizing the challenges presented by their increasingly one-sidedly empirical and naturalistic orientation. Husserl declares that mental and spiritual reality possess their own reality independent of any physical basis, and that a science of the mind (' Geisteswissenschaft ') must be established on as scientific a foundation as the natural sciences have managed: "It is my conviction that intentional phenomenology has for the first time made spirit as spirit the field of systematic scientific experience, thus effecting a total transformation of the task of knowledge."
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