| This dissertation contributes to an understanding of Husserl's idealisms by examining the role avoidance of metabasis eis allo genos plays in his phenomenology. Husserl's work is marked by an abiding, if not always explicit, concern to avoid this type of category mistake. I contend that both Husserl's early and late idealisms can be read as attempts to avoid metabasis. As a result, understanding this mistake, along with the closely related notion of 'countersense' (Widersinn) establishes the context for an appropriate interpretation of these idealisms.;I begin by considering the historical background for Husserl's concern with metabasis. Here, I examine the distant roots of the concept in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics and then move to engage a more proximate historical precedent in Brentano. Husserl appropriates these concerns with genus confusion, equivocation and scientific field delimitation, and expresses them clearly in his sustained attack on psychologism. In reducing the ideal to the real, psychologism commits a metabasis and falls into countersense. The path around psychologism's error leads to Husserl's early idealism, a metaphysically neutral position that confers objective status to both the ideal and the real.;Avoidance of metabasis plays an equally important role in the later transcendental idealism. In short, the reduction, and the resulting idealism, can be seen as extensions of Husserl's early concerns with category mistakes. Both the Cartesian and ontological ways to the reduction make sense in terms of metabasis and countersense prevention. That is, both ways establish a starting point for phenomenology in that they lead to a field of experience secured against natural category mistakes. Ultimately, I argue for a reading of transcendental idealism that allows Husserl (a) to accept the positive existence of the real world, (b) to abstain from addressing the question of its existence from within the epoche, and furthermore (c) to present analyses in which the ego has the character of absolute being. Such an idealism is a philosophical clarification and legitimation of the realism implicit in the natural attitude. |
