Introduction: Concepts of Tradition in Phenomenology
Introduction: Concepts of Tradition in Phenomenology

Summary/Abstract: Already at its first breakthrough, Husserl’s phenomenology demanded a complete suspension of all uncertified theory or meaning inherited from the past. Not only was Husserl’s famous return to “the things themselves” meant to dismiss any engagement in traditional, purely logical argumentation, and to draw attention to the significance of the direct presence and self-givenness of things in experience, but from the onset his philosophical program challenged all inherited “habits of thought” (Denkgewohnheiten) that determine our naïve reflection, and make it difficult for a purely phenomenological analysis to preserve its specific thematic attitude. Later on, Husserl developed this methodological position—already at work in the Logical Investigations— through the introduction of the phenomenological reduction, which was not only supposed to bracket all existential positing in general, but also to suspend any acquiring of previous knowledge as well as the assumed validity of all previously established sciences, regardless of how well-grounded or evident they were taken to be

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