Description, Reduction, Reflection

ideen« From description to reduction: remarks on the phenomenological role of reflection »
in P. Alves, E. Mariani (eds.), In the wake of Edmund Husserl’s Ideen I. A Century After: Internal Mutations and External Impacts of the Transcendental Stage of Phenomenology, Phainomenon, 2022

husserl-debout
Edmund Husserl

Abstract: This article analyses the fundamental relation between Husserl’s theory of reflection in the first volume of the Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and the two main concepts upon which transcendental phenomenology is grounded: namely, description and reduction. Although the concept of reflection was already used in the Logical Investigations, Husserl revised it entirely thanks to his analysis of time-consciousness in the 1905 Lectures. Reflection thus appears as a key-concept in understanding the ‘turn’ that led Husserl to deeply modify his descriptive method in order to move to transcendental phenomenology.

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