Extract

Peter SIMONS

Trinity College, Dublin

Causation in the realism project

Ingarden’s theory of causation, which makes up the uncompleted third volume of his magnum opus Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, is embedded in the general context of that work’s project, which is to elicit and elucidate the mode of existence of the real world, with a view to refuting Husserl’s transcendental idealism and upholding realism about the real world. Before considering the details of Ingarden’s account of causation it is worth indicating its position and role in this context.

Husserl’s phenomenology postulated a fundamental duality, a radical distinction between two or more realms of being: pure consciousness, and the rest, including besides ideal platonic objects, and unrealized possibilities, the real world of space, time, matter and causation. For present purposes we concentrate only on the real world, leaving platonic objects and pure possibilities aside. The transcendental procedure consists in directing attention not at the world itself but at the acts by which and through which it is given, the transcendental reduction being a way to avoid begging existence questions. The idea is to find the cognitive foundation for the belief that the real world exists. But Husserl’s transcendentalism, coupled with his views about the primacy of pure consciousness, meant that he came to deny the autonomy and fundamentality of the real world and considered it dependent in some way on consciousness. This is idealism, of whatever stripe. Ingarden...