Postulates Determining the Appropriate Method of Epistemology

Abstract

It so happened that in the very years that Husserl jumped into the arena of epistemology, Leonard Nelson directed a sharp attack against the theory of knowledge.¹⁰ We know that Nelson made an attempt to show the impossibility of epistemology by pointing out that inevitably in it one cannot avoid committing the error of petitio prinoipii, Husserl, as far as I know, never spoke nor wrote about this opinion expressed by Nelson and must have seen this danger clearly for himself, but he certainly knew about Nelson’s book. Whatever the relations were between the two thinkers, it is a fact that in the period when I heard Husserl’s lectures (with interruptions, from 1912 to 1917) he very often drew attention in his lectures and seminars to the “nonsense” (Widersinn) in the attempt to arrive at an epistemological solution, e.g. concerning the cognitive value of outer perception, by appealing to the existence of qualities in objects given in cognition of the kind which is investigated when, e.g. — as was usual in the psycho-physiology of the second half of the 19th century — we appeal to “physical stimuli” which act upon what is called our senses in order to show that sense perception falsely informs us about “secondary” qualities of material objects.