Abstract

Perhaps the most critical problem which faces any phenomenology of intersubjectivity is solipsism. In fact, the emergence of existential phenomenology can be explained as a reaction to the perception that Husserlian transcendental phenomenology is solipsistic. This work examines the phenomenologies of Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Stephan Strasser in terms of the issue of solipsism and the general import of their analyses for the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. ;After an Introduction which frames the course of study, Chapter II argues that Husserl's transcendentalism is indeed a solipsistic subjectivism. Husserl avers that an ego constitutes a world as an objective world through constituting it as an intersubjective world; a world which is meaningful not only for the ego itself, but also for others egos who objectively exist. I show, however, that there can be no valid objectivity for Husserl since his view that a subject's own transcendental ego is the only being whose existence can be indubitably affirmed precludes any justifiable affirmation of the objective existence of other egos. ;Chapter III shows how the approaches of Scutz and the existentialists, Merleau-Ponty and Strasser, dispel Husserlian solipsism since they affirm as given that human being is co-existence, being in an objective world-with-others. Still, I label Schutz's descriptions of intersubjective knowledge as "totalogically solipsistic" because in his view intended meaning has a private dimension which is unknowable by others. For Schutz, a subject can never know another's meanings qua the other's meanings, but a subject knows another only by projecting his private meanings as interpretations of his experience of the other. ;Chapter IV explicates Merleau-Ponty's overcoming of totalogical solipsism on the basis of his denial that intended meanings have a private dimension. However, I note that although he affirms human being is co-existence, he does not adequately describe the gentically original way in which a subject recognizes other subjects. ;Chapter V details Strasser's dialogal aproach, develops his description of the genetically original recognition of others, and concludes with a dialogal analysis of intersubjective morality.