Phenom Enology and Ontology

Ontologie ist nur als Phänomenologie möglich. David W oodruff Smith's Husserl (2007) sculpts Husserl, along with Aristotle and Kant, on the Mount Rushmore of 1 W estern philosophy. He does so because all three were great systematic philosophers whose systems radically changed and improved earlier ones (5). Smith says, " Integrating theories in logic, ontology, phenomenology, epistemology, and 2 social cum ethical theory— in a way that is not yet widely understood— Husserl developed a complex and wide-ranging system of philosophy " (2). The phenomenology for which Husserl is best known is, for Smith, only a part of Husserl's systematic philosophy, albeit a part that " plays its special role " (1). Its special role derives from the fact that it is the study of intentionality and thereby provides " the proper foundation for knowledge " (12; see also 77). But that alone, according to Smith, is insufficient to make Husserl's phenomenology fundamental. Phenomenology, Smith sometimes suggests, is first among equals, foundational in a special way among reciprocally founding parts: For Husserl… all philosophy is founded on the phenomenological theory of intentionality, but phenomenology, logic, ontology, and epistemology are in certain ways mutually founding. Thus, Husserl's philosophy developed with a kind of structured holism, even as phenomenology became the avowed centerpiece and the proclaimed foundation for the whole system (12). As we can detect in the last quoted sentence, however, Smith's acknowledgment of the priority Husserl gives phenomenology over the other philosophical sciences is grudging: " the avowed centerpiece and the proclaimed foundation " (my emphases) grudging. As he does in this quotation, Smith continually insists on the reciprocal foundation of the basic philosophical sciences of logic, ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology (see, e. and phenomenology ultimately remains just one part of Husserl's systematic philosophy. I believe Smith misunderstands the relation of phenomenology to ontology and that this leads, in turn, to a systematic misreading of Husserl's important phenomenological insights. In what follows I shall suggest (1) that Husserl reinscribes ontology within phenomenology and (2) that " ontologizing " the noema distorts Husserl's theory of intentionality. 2 1. Ontology and phenomenology. Smith provides two arguments for his view of the relation of ontology to phenomenology: (a) the continuity argument that underlies the claim that phenomenology is part of a larger philosophical whole, and (b) the presupposition argument that underlies the claim that ontology founds (in part) phenomenology. I shall challenge both …