Abstract

Within the literature on Husserl, there is fervent debate as to what Husserl has to say, if anything, about the relationship between minds and the world. In this thesis I respond to this debate by providing a comprehensive account of Husserl's own distinctive transcendental idealism. This thesis has two principle parts: The first half establishes my account on the basis of an examination of Husserl's writings, and the second half further elucidates and defends my account of Husserl's transcendental idealism by pitting it against some of the leading competing interpretations. ;Chapters Two--Five: In examining Husserl's Logical Investigations, Idea of Phenomenology, Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations, and the Crisis, I explain how Husserl's transcendental idealism emerges throughout his career not in breaks, but in an internally-motivated, consistent evolution. While I take time to articulate his idealist position at each various stage, my main purpose is to arrive at and defend his transcendental idealism as it emerges in the Ideas and onward. I argue here that Husserl's transcendental idealism endorses the view that objects and their meanings are products of transcendental consciousness and that this view has marked advantages over the philosophies of his idealist predecessors. Properly explicating and motivating this view is critical and so I am concerned throughout with establishing the compatibility of this claim with his realism regarding natural objects and his adherence to the mind-independence of the world. ;Chapters Six--Nine: In the second half of the thesis I examine other prominent interpretations of Husserl which are in significant disagreement with my own and demonstrate the marked advantages of the interpretation I have set forward in the first half of this thesis. I select interpretations that cover a large spectrum of contemporary Husserl scholarship, including those of Hubert Dreyfus, Dagfinn Follesdal, Aron Gurwitsch, Jean-Luc Marion, and Robert Sokolowski