Husserl's First Four Cartesian Meditations on Metaphysics
Although he was known as a serious man, Edmund Husserl was fond of telling his students a self-deprecating anecdote from his childhood. As a young boy, he had once received a pocket-knife as a gift. However, his new knife had a problem: the blade was a little blunt. Husserl set to work, grinding the knife on the sharpening stone, but the blade was never quite as sharp as he would have desired. Undeterred, he kept grinding and grinding, until eventually nothing remained of his knife but the handle. His former student, Emmanuel Levinas, recalled that Husserl told this story in a pessimistic tone - he thought the incident symbolised something about his philosophical endeavours 1 . There is certainly no shortage of knife sharpening to be found in Husserl's work. At the time of his death in 1938, Husserl had amassed a collection of research manuscripts consisting of over 45,000 pages of unpublished material 2 . Even Husserl's published work is known for its length, and also for the convoluted style of prose in which Husserl conducts his phenomenological investigations. For this reason, it can be difficult to grasp the 'big picture' of Husserl's philosophy without becoming lost in the weeds. This thesis explores the following question: how should the metaphysics of Husserl's philosophy be understood? My hope is that an exploration of this question will help to situate Husserl's work in a broader philosophical context.
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