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The purpose of Husserl's argument is to demonstrate that consciousness constitutes the world. The purpose of the transcendental-phenomenological epoche is to bring the world-constitutive function of consciousness into the purview of reflective intuition, so that the manner of this functioning can be elucidated through constitutive analysis.² There has been considerable discussion in the literature on Husserl concerning whether the epoche and the reduction are the same.³ Some seem to hold that for Husserl the words "epoche" and "reduction" are synonyms, others that they refer to distinguishable aspects of the same operation, and still others that they refer to distinct operations. My understanding of the matter is based on a certain way Husserl often describes the relationship between epoche and reduction. In one place Husserl states that the transcendental reduction is the "accomplishment of a reduction of "the' world to the transcendental phenomenon "world,' a reduction thus also to its correlate, transcendental subjectivity, in and through whose "conscious life' the world, valid for us straight forwardly and naively prior to all science, attains and always has attained its whole content and ontic validity."⁴ In this context, Husserl indicates that the transcendental epoche makes this reduction "possible."⁵ Elsewhere, he writes that the "method of transcendental epoche, because it leads back to this realm of transcendental being], is called transcendent al-phenomenological reduction."⁶

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-7573-6_5

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