DANIEL PELUSO GUILHERMINO

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the phenomenological theory of knowledge in Husserl’s Logical Investigations. The aim is to explain how Husserl phenomenologically converts the traditional problem of knowledge, which is usually addressed as the enigma of the connection between the immanence of the mind and the transcendence of the world. Husserl reveals that this positioning of the question is metaphysically loaded. The task of phenomenology is to suspend the validity of the metaphysical presuppositions of the immanence of the mind and the transcendence of the world and move back to the structuring elements of intentional lived experiences. By doing so, the concepts of giving and transcendence can be clarified and the question of the theory of knowledge can be restated, now in a phenomenological register. The question is no longer about the enigma of access to transcendence, but about the way in which transcendence is given: in other words, it is no longer a question of asking whether the openness to the world is possible, but of explaining how this openness of the world is accomplished. To reach this goal, we use as a guiding thread the contemporary problem of the Myth of the Given, which provides a model for the problem of the theory of knowledge in its non-phenomenological version. In the course of the thesis, we are confronted with a series of historical and analytical investigations, such as Lotze’s problem about the real meaning of logical categories, the origins of the problem of givenness in contemporary philosophy from Lewis to Sellars, McDowell’s conceptualism, and the structure of sensible and categorial givenness in Husserl. Finally, we put forward some interpretative theses about pre-transcendental phenomenology, namely: its essential link between the theory of knowledge and metaphysics, the absence of representationalism in its theory of sensibility, and the absence of psychologism in its theory of understanding.