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Situating Phenomenology: Husserl's Acceptance of the Contextual Powers that Be
- Journal of the History of Philosophy
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 45, Number 4, October 2007
- pp. 603-634
- 10.1353/hph.2007.0086
- Article
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Many philosophers interpret Edmund Husserl as relying upon his phenomenological epoché to escape contextual powers so as to recover a contextually unconditioned "constituting" consciousness. I show, however, that in both Ideas I and Cartesian Meditations Husserl relies upon the epoché for something more modest, though important: studying the immanent "reaches" of experience—experience providing, among other things, intuitive disclosures that ultimately legitimate all "science." For this study, experience is to be taken as it exists, even if contextually conditioned. The epoché thus supports a study of experiential immanence—a study definitive of phenomenology—compatible with contextual conditioning.