Reason and rational freedom in Husserl: Towards an epistemology of authenticity

This dissertation discloses and critiques certain neo-Kantian presuppositions about mind and world that are operative in contemporary discussions of epistemology. Such presuppositions inform the way in which many philosophers oppose the conceptual freedom of reason to the passivity of sensibility. Dualistic assumptions about the human mind continue to make the notion of any nonconceptual content in perception seem indefensible. Yet there is indeed a way out of the oscillation between coherentism and foundationalism, an oscillation diagnosed recently in John McDowell's Mind and World.;I argue in the dissertation that an untenable dualism in neo-Kantian epistemology can and should be overcome by a phenomenological description of the situation of the knowing subject. According to this argument, the knower can appropriate the known to herself in a way that is both rationally free and responsive to passive structures of sense experience. Rational freedom should be understood not as an unbounded conceptual spontaneity that arises ex nihilo but rather as an authentic appropriation of certain unfree conditions of freedom. Among these factors that condition but do not overdetermine perceptual content are passively given synthetic forms and inherited socio-linguistic traditions. An epistemology of authenticity implies the need for the knower's free response to the influences of her past on her present perceptual content. What the knower should take responsibility for in the logical space of reasons, then, is neither herself nor the world but her past dealings with a world that was not then and is not now reducible to such dealings.;Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of knowledge provides grounds for a balanced view of the situation of rational freedom within nature. The dissertation takes as its starting point his conception of a new and specifically phenomenological critique of reason. By tracing his development of originally Kantian notions of synthesis, reason, and sensibility, I argue that Husserl transforms the modern philosophical tradition from within by reconciling empirical and transcendental approaches to the knowing self. Phenomenological notions of intuitive reason, rational motivation, and the genetic history of the self can be appropriated for the purpose of a contemporary synthesis between empirical psychology and transcendental philosophy.