Introduction

Abstract

I have particular reason for being glad that I may talk about transcendental phenomenology in this, the most venerable abode of French science.¹ France’s greatest thinker, René Descartes, gave transcendental phenomenology new impulses through his Meditations; their study acted quite directly on the transformation of an already developing phenomenology into a new kind of transcendental philosophy. Accordingly one might almost call transcendental phenomenology a neo-Cartesianism, even though it is obliged — and precisely by its radical development of Cartesian motifs — to reject nearly all the well-known doctrinal content of the Cartesian philosophy.