Abstract

There is clearly some relationship between Husserl's transcendental idealist phenomenology and skepticism about the objects of the external world. Husserl himself says that skepticism "draws its power in secret" from the phenomenological "dimension," or that phenomenology overcomes skepticism by "making it true in a higher sense" . My dissertation attempts to explain precisely what that relation is. I focus on Husserl's views at the time he wrote book I of the Ideen, and I make use of the analysis of skepticism found in the early parts of Stanley Cavell's Claim of Reason. As a means to this end, I establish a parallel between the Thomistic metaphysics of causation and the epistemologies of Husserl and Cavell. It emerges that Husserl is, in a sense, able to refute the Cavellian skeptic, but that this comes at an extremely high price: in effect, the deification of the ego, which in turn renders absurd the basis of morality. I close by asking how we ought to respond to such a metaphysically "dangerous" doctrine, and in particular by pointing out that the danger may lie less in the doctrine than in the response.