KNOWING FROM EXPERIENCE: ON INDUCTION IN A BROADER SENSE AND THE INTUITION OF ESSENCES

Phenomenology, in its Husserlian design, appeared as a form of descriptive psychology that aimed to overcome the boundaries of an empiric science and become a pure, eidetic discipline. In this paper, I reevaluate the relation between Husserl’s phenomenology and Brentano’s descriptive psychology or psychognosy. I argue that despite Husserl’s famous retraction of his initial characterization of phenomenology as descriptive psychology, in Brentano’s specific method of psychognosy exists a step that is not specific to any empirical science, does not imply any positing, and it is not bound to the actual world, namely: induction in a broader sense or the intuitive grasping of laws that arise from concepts.