Key Arguments

• Having clarified apodicticity and recalled the Cartesian principle of absolute indubitability, Husserl asks whether and how this principle can ‘help us make an actual beginning’, thus transforming the notion of apodictic evidence into a concrete requirement for the starting point of philosophy.
• He formulates an ‘initial definite question of beginning philosophy’: ‘whether it is possible for us to bring out evidences that, on the one hand, carry with them — as we now must say: apodictically — the insight that, as “first in themselves”, they precede all other imaginable evidences and, on the other hand, can be seen to be themselves apodictic.’
• He allows that such first evidences might still be inadequate in the sense of not exhaustively giving their objects, but insists that ‘If they should turn out to be inadequate, they would have to possess at least a recognizable apodictic content, they would have to give us some being that is firmly secured “once for all”, or absolutely, by virtue of their apodicticity.’
• By posing this as the guiding question of ‘beginning philosophy’, he ties the foundational problem of an absolute starting point to the earlier requirement (from §§ 5–6) that the beginning of a definitive system of science must rest on evidences that are intrinsically primary and maximally certain.

Source Quotes

And the same is true of every critical reflection at a higher level.1 We remember now the Cartesian principle for building genuine science: the principle of absolute indubitability, by which every imaginable doubt (even though it were in fact groundless) was to be excluded. If, by our meditations, we have acquired that principle in a clarified form, there arises the question whether and how it might help us make an actual beginning. In accordance with what has already been said, we now formulate, as an initial definite question of beginning philosophy, the question whether it is possible for us to bring out evidences that, on the one hand, carry with them — as we now must say: apodictically — the insight that, as “first in themselves”, they precede all other imaginable evidences and, on the other hand, can be seen to be themselves apodictic.

If, by our meditations, we have acquired that principle in a clarified form, there arises the question whether and how it might help us make an actual beginning. In accordance with what has already been said, we now formulate, as an initial definite question of beginning philosophy, the question whether it is possible for us to bring out evidences that, on the one hand, carry with them — as we now must say: apodictically — the insight that, as “first in themselves”, they precede all other imaginable evidences and, on the other hand, can be seen to be themselves apodictic. If they should turn out to be inadequate, they would have to possess at least a recognizable apodictic content, they would have to give us some being that is firmly secured “once for all”, or absolutely, by virtue of their apodicticity.

In accordance with what has already been said, we now formulate, as an initial definite question of beginning philosophy, the question whether it is possible for us to bring out evidences that, on the one hand, carry with them — as we now must say: apodictically — the insight that, as “first in themselves”, they precede all other imaginable evidences and, on the other hand, can be seen to be themselves apodictic. If they should turn out to be inadequate, they would have to possess at least a recognizable apodictic content, they would have to give us some being that is firmly secured “once for all”, or absolutely, by virtue of their apodicticity. How, / and even whether, it would be

Key Concepts

• If, by our meditations, we have acquired that principle in a clarified form, there arises the question whether and how it might help us make an actual beginning.
• In accordance with what has already been said, we now formulate, as an initial definite question of beginning philosophy, the question whether it is possible for us to bring out evidences that, on the one hand, carry with them — as we now must say: apodictically — the insight that, as “first in themselves”, they precede all other imaginable evidences and, on the other hand, can be seen to be themselves apodictic.
• If they should turn out to be inadequate, they would have to possess at least a recognizable apodictic content, they would have to give us some being that is firmly secured “once for all”, or absolutely, by virtue of their apodicticity.
• as “first in themselves”, they precede all other imaginable evidences
• some being that is firmly secured “once for all”, or absolutely, by virtue of their apodicticity.

Context

Later part of § 6, where Husserl converts the clarified Cartesian principle of apodicticity into a concrete methodological demand for the transcendental-philosophical beginning: to locate apodictic, intrinsically first evidences that can serve as the absolutely secure foundation for genuine, universally grounded science.