Key Arguments

• From the non‑apodicticity of world‑evidence Husserl infers that suspending trust in existing sciences is insufficient: ‘It follows that denying acceptance to all the sciences given us beforehand, treating them as, for us, inadmissible prejudices 1, is not enough.’
• He insists that the universal basis of those sciences—the experienced world—must likewise lose its naïve taken‑for‑grantedness: ‘Their universal basis, the experienced world, must also be deprived of its naïve acceptance.’
• He formulates the methodological consequence: ‘The being of the world, by reason of the evidence of natural experience, must no longer be for us an obvious matter of fact; it too must be for us, henceforth, only an acceptance-phenomenon.’
• By recasting the world’s being as a mere ‘acceptance-phenomenon’, Husserl integrates the existence of the world itself into the field of what is to be critically interrogated rather than used as an unquestioned starting point, extending the Cartesian overthrow from particular beliefs and sciences to the very ‘obvious’ world-basis of those beliefs.

Source Quotes

We shall retain only this much: that the evidence of world-experience would, at all events, need to be criticized with regard to its validity and range, before it could be used for the purposes of a radical grounding of science, and that therefore we / must not take that evidence to be, without question, immediately apodictic. It follows that denying acceptance to all the sciences given us beforehand, treating them as, for us, inadmissible prejudices 1, is not enough. Their universal basis, the experienced world, must also be deprived of its naïve acceptance.

It follows that denying acceptance to all the sciences given us beforehand, treating them as, for us, inadmissible prejudices 1, is not enough. Their universal basis, the experienced world, must also be deprived of its naïve acceptance. The being of the world, by reason of the evidence of natural experience, must no longer be for us an obvious matter of fact; it too must be for us, henceforth, only an acceptance-phenomenon.

Their universal basis, the experienced world, must also be deprived of its naïve acceptance. The being of the world, by reason of the evidence of natural experience, must no longer be for us an obvious matter of fact; it too must be for us, henceforth, only an acceptance-phenomenon. If we maintain this attitude, is any being whatever left us as a basis for judgments, let alone for evidences on which we could establish an all-embracing philosophy and, furthermore, do so apodictically?

Key Concepts

• It follows that denying acceptance to all the sciences given us beforehand, treating them as, for us, inadmissible prejudices 1, is not enough
• Their universal basis, the experienced world, must also be deprived of its naïve acceptance
• The being of the world, by reason of the evidence of natural experience, must no longer be for us an obvious matter of fact; it too must be for us, henceforth, only an acceptance-phenomenon

Context

Middle portion of § 7, where Husserl draws the methodological consequence of the non‑apodicticity of world‑experience by extending the Cartesian ‘overthrow’ from the sciences to their very experiential world‑basis.