La controversia idealismo-realismo (1907-1931). Breve storia concettuale di una contesa tra Husserl e gli allievi di Monaco e Gottinga

Abstract

Starting from two contradictory claims regarding whether realist phenomenologists accepted Husserl’s transcendental reduction, I will try to show that these ones are about two different points of view on Husserl’s idealism. The first one, which I call the epistemological one, refuses transcendental reduction because it limits the phenomenological inquiry; the second one, which I call the ontological one, accepts the reduction for the very opposite reason, but rejects the theory of the pure Ego since it is non-phenomenological. I will show that these two point of view arose in two different period of Husserl’s thought evolution and that they can live together, even though they are irreducible. In doing that I provide a brief history of the idealism-realism controversy, through which I aim at clarifying some crucial points of this history