Why Husserl is a Moderate Foundationalist

Abstract

Foundationalism and coherentism are two fundamentally opposed basic epistemological views about the structure of justification. Interestingly enough, there is no consensus on how to interpret Husserl. While interpreting Husserl as a foundationalist was the standard view in early Husserl scholarship, things have changed considerably as prominent commentators like Christian Beyer, John Drummond, Dagfinn Føllesdal, and Dan Zahavi have challenged this foundationalist interpretation. These anti-foundationalist interpretations have again been challenged, for instance, by Walter Hopp and Christian Erhard. One might suspect that inconsistencies in Husserl's writings are the simple reason for this disagreement. I shall argue, however, that the real question is not so much how to read Husserl, but how to define foundationalism and that there is overwhelming textual evidence that Husserl championed the most tenable version of foundationalism: a moderate foundationalism that allows for incorporating coherentist elements.

Husserl on rationality

“…Let us start with the first, that is, with the claim that "every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition." On my reading, what is expressed here is a view that is usually referred to as "moderate foundationalism" (Berghofer, 2018a). According to it, the structure of any body of knowledge is foundational in the sense that (a) every piece of knowledge is either direct or indirect, and that (b) all pieces of indirect knowledge depend on one or more pieces of direct knowledge.…”

“…Hence, a central aim of this paper is to offer a modified phenomenological theory of rationality that evades the problems of Husserl's original account. Second, far from being only of narrow exegetical interest, getting clear on his theory of rationality has farranging implications for our understanding of Husserl's overall epistemology: Recent years have seen a number of contributions in which Husserl is portrayed as a moderate foundationalist (Berghofer, 2018a;Hopp, 2020) who defends a weak form of internalism (Berghofer, 2018b;Hopp, 2011) and whose overall position shows certain similarities with Michael Huemer's phenomenal conservativism (Berghofer & Wiltsche, 2019;Hopp, 2016;Wiltsche, 2015). Building on these previous works, an important goal of this paper is to show that Husserl's epistemology is necessarily incomplete without an adequate theory of rationality.…”

First Philosophy

“…34 On Husserl's alleged foundationalism and exactly which kind of foundationalist he is, cf. the helpful discussion by Berghofer (2018), who also gives a survey of this discussion both in contemporary philosophy of mind as well as in the scholarship on Husserl beginning with Føllesdal and up to more recent works by Drummond, Beyer, and Zahavi. It should be pointed out, however, that Berghofer, too, repeats the old error that Husserl does not distinguish between adequate and apodictic evidence until the Cartesian Meditations (cf.…”

Husserl’s Conception of Experiential Justification: What It Is and Why It Matters

“…We can say: An experience E provides immediate justification for believing proposition p if having E is sufficient for justifiably believing that p. In order to be justified, the belief that p is not in need of epistemic support of anything other than the underlying experience E. It has been argued that Husserl's conception of horizonal intentionality and the fact that he acknowledges the epistemic force of coherence show that Husserl does not allow for immediate justification and in further consequence that he cannot be considered a foundationalist. I have refuted such claims in Berghofer (2017). Moderate foundationalist systems can allow for incorporating coherentist elements, and Husserl's conception of horizonal intentionality concerns the structure of experience, not the structure of justification.…”