Philosophy as Fallible Science

Abstract

One hundred years after the publication of Husserl’s essay “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” the relationship between his description about mental states, our access to them, and the relationship between his views about our access to our own mental states and his conception of the status of philosophy as a rigorous science in this essay is still not completely clear. If the aim is to answer the question about whether and to what extent Husserl remained committed to the project of phenomenology described in that essay as the key to realizing philosophy’s aspirations to be a science at all, the first step would be to address these questions in that order. In a second, much briefer step, then, I will address the question about whether Husserl’s views on these issues later changed and how these affect his views about the viability of phenomenology as a means to achieve the traditional goals of philosophy as he describes them in the essay.