The Phenomenon of Reality and Reality

Abstract

One of the most common and most fundamental criticisms of phenomenology has always been: What can a science of mere phenomena tell about reality itself? It may tell us what we take to be real. But does this in any way guarantee that the supposedly real is actually real? How can phenomenology decide the truth of what we mean? Is not this the end and a rather quick end of every phenomenology?

To the memory of Kurt Huber, my teacher at the University of Munich. Martyr of the German Resistance to Nazism, and redeemer of the tradition of my alma mater, who started me on the problem of this study.

“The ‘Reality-Phenomenon’ and Reality,” in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. By Marvin Farber (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940), 99 84–105; and “Critical Phenomenological Realism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1 (1941), pp. 154–76.