Phenomenological Realism: Selected Essays

The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl is being analyzed in regard to its ontological implications. It is demonstrated that Husserl's method of reduction directly leads to an ontological idealism for which there is no epistemological justification. An alternative to this «idealistic» misunderstanding of the phenomenological approach is being developed in applying Heidegger's existential analysis to questions of epistemology and transcendental philosophy. It is thus shown that phenomenology may be established on safer grounds: not on the basis of a pure transcendental subject, but on life-world understood in the realistic sense of transcending the ego.