NOTES ON THE IDEEN OF HUSSERL

Husserl's Ideen has an introduction in which Husserl says that his use of the term "phenomenology" in the Logical Investigations has been widely misunderstood. Phenomenology was taken to be a sort of descriptive psychology that described experiences as they seemed or felt to the experiencing person without the attempt to relate to the real world or to their causes and effects in that world, in particular the psychophysical ones. Phenomenology so described was thought to be an excellent foundation for experimental psychology, only some of Husserl's doctrines, for example, his belief in an intuition of essences and categories, were suspect from this experimental point of view. Husserl says that phenomenology is not psychology, descriptive or otherwise, and that it requires an entirely different attitude from psychology.