Abstract

HOPKINS, Burt. Back to Husserl: Reclaiming the traditional philosophical context of the phenomenological ‘problem’ of the other: Leibniz’s Monadology. arete, 2011, vol.23, no.2, p.357-380. ISSN 1016-913X.

The internal motivation that led Husserl to revise his early view of the pure Ego as empty of essential content is traced to the end of explicating his reformulation of phenomenology as the egology of the concrete transcendental Ego. The necessity of recasting transcendental phenomenology as a transcendental idealism that follows from this reformulation is presented and the appearance of transcendental solipsism of this idealism exposed as unfounded. That the ground of this exposure is Husserl’s phenomenological appropriation of Leibniz’s metaphysical insights into the problem of accounting for the plurality of monads, and, therefore, not the Cartesian problem of the other mind, is presented as the key to reclaiming the traditional philosophical context of the phenomenological problem of the other.

Keywords: Husserl; pure Ego; monad; Leibniz; transcendental idealism.