The ego and the other in a pairing relation

pp. 9-30

in: Steeves, Founding community, Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

The Husserlian corpus contains numerous passages focusing on intersubjectivity and related issues. Husserliana XIII–XV, texts collected and edited by Iso Kern in 1973, span the first thirty-five years of this century and bear witness to Husserl's dynamic account of social ontology. Indeed, it is a question that never left him and one which he never thought to have solved in its entirety. To pick the Cartesian Meditations from this catalog and claim for it a special standing as Husserl's definitive theory of intersubjectivity would, clearly, be an historic and scholarly inaccuracy. Kern's introductions make clear that there is no reason to privilege the Cartesian Meditations—it is simply one statement of one form of one theory.