Making Sense of the Meaning of World Annihilation in Husserl

Abstract

In the first book of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Husserl posits that the status of being of the world is not apodictic, contrarily to that of the phenomenologically reduced self from the epoché. In this paper, we explore the various meanings of this statement in Husserl’s work, arguing that, although he nuanced it in his later works, he maintained the conviction that the apodicticity of the self and that of the world meet in a phenomenological asymmetry.