Abstract

The paper examines Husserl's conception of the gnoseological problem in the years when the transcendental turn of his philosophy was maturing, and points out some new insights in comparison with the epistemology of the "Logische Untersuchungen". The main difference concerns the general task of the theory of knowledge and will have a decisive influence on the genesis of phenomenological idealism. In fact, the transcendental turn depends on the idea that epistemology has to describe knowledge in its forms of realization rather than justify its validity and, in particular, has to be concerned with the "mode of giveness" of transcendent objects. Though already in part sketched in the "Logische Untersuchungen", this idea achieves a complete definition in the 1906-07 lectures, by the explicit distinction between noetic and the theory of knowledge.