Abstract
This chapter revisits Husserl’s famous essay “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” to examine what Husserl says there about mental states and how his views about the differences between mental states and physical objects are related to his idea of philosophy as a possible science. I argue that phenomenological philosophy as a science does depend on a different mode of access to the phenomena than third-person observation, namely through an analysis of intentionality as the mode of access to one’s mental states, i. e. through a first-person approach. However, as an analysis of the structures of intentional experience and the objects that present themselves in experience, phenomenology does not depend on the indubitable reliability of one’s own direct awareness of (at least some) one’s individual mental states.
