Husserl claimed that reduction is the true starting point of phenomenological research, but to figure out how this deed should actually be accomplished has turned out to be a very challenging task. In this study, I explicate how Husserl accomplished reduction during his series of lectures entitled The Idea of Phenomenology. He does not state it explicitly, but what actually happened on the last day of the lectures can be seen as consistent with his descriptions of reduction as an act. (...) Understood in this way, reduction is the model of how to do philosophy. The result of Husserl’s reduction is the correlation between appearance and “that which appears” or, to use Husserl’s later terminology, between noēsis and noēma. When this correlation is understood as an outcome of reduction and not as a result of an analysis, we, as readers of Husserl, will be in a better position to avoid natural attitude in our interpretations. (shrink)

Evidence is the very core of Husserlian phenomenology, with the term “evidence” signifying for Husserl the phenomenological perspective on the question of truth. In contrast to the conventional philosophical understanding of “truth” in mainly epistemological terms, Husserl’s notion of “evidence”, as elaborated in his Logical Investigations (1900–1), is more essentially ontological, pointing to the way in which a phenomenon becomes clear to us in its constitution. Husserl’s main point in the Sixth Investigation was that we can “see” how evidence functions (...) when we compare something in the fullness of its presence with the emptiness of its absence. This paper considers the example Husserl offers of the room where the lights go off in order to illuminate the breakthrough for phenomenology achieved by Logical Investigations in its move beyond logic and epistemology to the primary level of pretheoretical experience as the reality of the real. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 2 August 2006. (shrink)