Cartesian Meditations

Introduction

In February 1929 Husserl gave two lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris introducing transcendental phenomenology. He expanded them into five “meditations”, which appeared in 1931 in a French translation by Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Levinas; the German text, which Husserl kept revising, was published only in 1950. Like Descartes he begins with the ego, but replaces doubt with the epoché and finds not a thinking substance but a stream of experiences in which the world is constituted. The long fifth meditation answers the charge of solipsism: others are given through the “pairing” of their bodies with mine and the “appresentation” of their experience. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas took up and criticised this account.

Connections

Builds on

• Meditations on First Philosophy1641 · René Descartes

Criticized in

• Totality and Infinity1961 · Emmanuel Levinas

More works by Edmund Husserl

• 1900Logical Investigations
• 1913Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology
• 1936The Crisis of European Sciences