On Husserl and Cavellian Scepticism

In the early parts of The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell develops an account of scepticism based on his distinction between specific and generic objects. Because there are no (‘Austinian’) criteria for generic objects, it seems that we cannot know them; and the sceptic argues that this kind of knowledge is a ‘best case’, so that failure here indicates the impossibility of knowledge in general. I show that, in Husserl's Ideen I, the transcendental ego is the cause of being of all objects qua generic, or, in other words, that we know generic objects in the manner of an intellectus archetypus. Hence Husserl has a kind of refutation of the Cavellian sceptic, albeit perhaps at a very high price.