Abstract

In this article it is argued that the phenomenological primacy of consciousness coincides with the primacy of experience, since something exists for us only as long as it is manifested in experience. Phenomenological analysis tends therefore to highlight the acts of consciousness that are indispensable so that some determinate kinds of objects can appear, and in this sense these acts of consciousness are conditions of the possibility of knowledge. The known objects, however, maintain their status and their ontological independence intact, since consciousness is receptivity: it makes the manifestation of reality possible, but does not construct it.