Instructions
Note: this assignment is for students in Group II only.
The assignment is due, as an attachment, via the “Assignments” tool on
eCommons, by midnight Thursday, November 12 (in PDF or any format easily
converted to PDF, e.g. MSWord, LATEX, RTF, plain text).
Please respond to the following question in approximately two pages (double
spaced). (Needless to say this should be your own original work.)
In Ideas §32, Husserl makes a connection between “attempted doubt” and
the peculiar modification or change in attitude which he ocalls ἐποχή
(epochē). On the other hand, he says that ἐποχή is not exactly the same
thing as Descartes’s attempted doubt, because “in the attempt to doubt
… the ‘excluding’ is brought about in and with a modification of counter
positing, namely the ‘supposition’ of non-being” (p. 59). In other words,
Descartes’s attempt to doubt, unlike Husserl’s ἐποχή, involves supposing
that our original positing was wrong. How, according to Husserl, is the
proposed phenomenological ἐποχή therefore related to (similar to and different
from) Descartes’s universal attempted doubt (in procedure, scope, and
aim)?