Abstract

This study investigates the sense in which Husserl's philosophy is a form of idealism. The first chapter discusses the ambiguity of the concept of 'idealism' and developes a doctrine which, in a descriptive sense, I call 'rational idealism': the doctrine that there is a correlation between the real and the rational in the sense that the real is the rational and the rational the real. I contrast this view with creative, reductive, and absolute idealism. In the second chapter I argue that the idealism which we find in Ideas 1 is rational in this sense. The key theses are that what things are they are precisely as things of experience, and that there is a correlation between the actual and the knowable. In the third chapter I present a summary and critique of the creative interpretation as championed by Theodore De Boer. This interpretation is rejected as being textully inadequate and phenomenologically mystifying. In the final chapter I conclude my defense of the rational interpretation by discussing the concept of constitution and the paradox of subjectivity. I show that 'constitution' means 'rendering experientially present', and that Husserl resolves the paradox of subjectivity by showing that the transcendental ego is identical with an actual existent within the actual world.