Evidence in Husserl’s Phenomenology

Abstract

Dorion Cairns has stated the fundamental methodological principle of phenomenology as follows: “No opinion is to be accepted as philosophical knowledge unless it is seen to be adequately established by observation of what is seen as itself given ‘in person.’”¹ Sense data, perceived objects, psychic acts, emotions, ideas, and essences, are all given, but the givenness is of very different kinds and orders. Phenomenology differs from empiricism in accepting not only sense-data, but everything that is given. However, “it differs far more profoundly from any philosophy that sets up formal definitions and postulates, or material hypotheses, and proceeds by a method of formal deduction — supplemented perhaps by material interpretation and ‘verification’… To take conceptual stuff already on hand and fashion a cloak for objects in absentia, then call them in for a partial fitting — that is at best only a way to botch together another ingenious misfit to hang away with how many others in the lumber room of history. The matters judged about must themselves be present from the start, and throughout the entire theorizing process they must never be out of sight.”²