Abstract

There has been much discussion, one way and another, in recent philosophy, of what has come to be known as ‘the transcendental turn’. Apart from allegations of parallelism between Kant and Wittgenstein, there is the whole development of Phenomenology and Existentialism which relates to this issue. Husserl’s philosophy as a whole centres upon the phenomenological reduction, or epoche, which establishes the ultimate and irreducible nature of the transcendental subject, the primary constituting source of all conscious experience. This again has been criticized by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who seek to substitute for the transcendental Ego a more ambiguous existential being-in-the-world to bridge the antithesis between the in-itself and the for-itself.