Husserl's Cartesian Meditations

For this session, we'll be reading Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations focusing on the Introduction, Meditation 1 (The Way of the Transcendental Ego) and Meditation 3 (Constitutional Problems. Truth and Actuality) with the other sections being optional.

Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations refines his method of phenomenology by returning to Descartes’ radical doubt, not to question knowledge, but to suspend all assumptions about the external world. In the Introduction and Meditation I, Husserl introduces the epoché, or phenomenological reduction—bracketing the natural attitude to focus on how things appear in conscious experience. This move isolates the structures of intentionality, the directedness of consciousness toward objects.

Meditation III presents the transcendental ego, the pure subject that constitutes meaning and objectivity. This ego is not part of the world but the condition for its appearance as meaningful. Husserl’s goal is a presuppositionless foundation for philosophy rooted in lived experience, not external observation.