Abstract

This work is an effort at philosophical reconstruction. It endeavors critically to retrieve the idea of reason that belongs to modern philosophy and to phenomenology, in a way that takes account of what Marsh sees as the postmodern challenges to that idea. The reconstruction Marsh proposes takes the form of a "dialectical phenomenology," in which Hegel and Husserl are chastened by each other and by their philosophical successors. Dialectical phenomenology is dialectical in that it roots thinking in historical experience and surpasses "either-or" oppositions in "both-and" mediations. It is phenomenological in its endeavors to secure relative apodicticity for its claims, to recognize differences and relations among distinguishable structures that belong to experience, and to recover an illumining understanding of the life-world in which the self is involved and of the self which is intelligible with reference to worldly involvements.