Version: Audiobook at Spotify. Narrator: Leighton Pugh The text was read with extreme clarity.

Dr. Hans Utter was discussing his philosophic views in a couple of episodes of his podcast, The Resonant State, and the topics involved peaked my interest.

I don’t have any particular conclusions to make yet on Husserl’s Ideas. This is only an effort to explore and understand the topic.

The following points are based on the description:

Introduction by philosophy professor Taylor Carman.

Philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was the founder of phenomenology.

Ideas: Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy was published in 1913.

Phenomenology tries to explain “human experience as it is lived” without relying on theories or speculation.

The “phenomena” are the “concrete texture of lived experience.”

The purpose of phenomenology is to investigate “ordinary awareness of ourselves and the world.”

The object of Husserl’s investigation, in other words, is consciousness.

I think many of us can agree that consciousness is an important subject for investigation and better understanding.

This book and the sequel strongly influenced existentialist philosophers, including Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

I found the text difficult to understand.

My sense of it overall, if I’m not mistaken, was that Husserl was attempting to build a systematic logical framework from the ground up for the purpose of phenomenological investigation and understanding. In the text he would compare fields such as geometry to his study.

I admit to a lack of interest in what he was discussing. I hope that the second volume, if I ever get to it, has more interesting conclusions.

In several respects, it reminded me of Ludwig von Mises’ work in the completely different field of economics, Human Action. I appreciated his effort to build up a system of knowledge logically from the ground up–from the basis of intuiting particular axioms. Whether or not he is correct is another question.

It seems to me that Husserl was claiming to do something similar in the way he described his own field of study. Maybe this type of classical approach was more standard in the early 20th century.

I plan to focus on defining and discussing certain terms Husserl uses, starting with a priori.

As an example, this is how the term is used in Wikipedia’s description of Human Action by Mises:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Action:

Human Action: A Treatise on Economics is a work by the Austrian economist and philosopher Ludwig von Mises. Widely considered Mises’ magnum opus, it presents the case for laissez-faire capitalism based on praxeology, his method to understand the structure of human decision-making. Mises rejected positivism within economics, and defended an a priori foundation for praxeology, as well as methodological individualism and laws of self-evident certainty.

I’m not claiming his book is correct about everything, just using it as an example.

Here is a definition of the terms a priori and a posteriori
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori:

In epistemology, a priori (‘from the earlier’) and a posteriori (‘from the later’) are the two categories of knowledge, justification, or argument, determining whether or not a proposition is reliant on outside sensory experience. Roughly speaking, a proposition is known or justified a priori if it is known or justified independently of any experience (beyond the experience necessary to understand the proposition). It is known or justified a posteriori if its knowledge and/or justification depends on empirical evidence. For example, the proposition ‘It is sunny in London today’ can be known (if true) a posteriori, whereas the proposition ‘Either it is sunny or it is not sunny in London today’ can be known a priori.

Fields of knowledge where a priori justification is predominant are, for example, mathematics and formal logic; by contrast, most of the sciences generally involve a posteriori justification. ….

On this point, the thought occurred to me that I could have misunderstood Husserl because his study of consciousness is supposed to be based on actual experiences. Aren’t conscious experiences a posteriori if they are experiences? Did Husserl really consider them a priori forms of knowledge?

An AI (brave.com search engine) validates my initial understanding:

Yes, Edmund Husserl argues in Ideas that his system of phenomenology is built on a priori knowledge. He defines phenomenology as a science of essences (Eidos), which deals with universal, necessary structures of consciousness rather than contingent, empirical facts.

Because these essences are valid independently of whether their objects actually exist in the world, they are knowable through pure intuition and eidetic variation. Husserl contrasts this with the positive sciences, which rely on a posteriori knowledge of actualities, asserting that phenomenology provides the apodictic (indubitable) foundation for all other knowledge.

Some of the above terms and others, I want to discuss and explorer further in an effort to understand.

To be continued