Abstract

This paper focuses on the puzzling question of what motivates the radical epistemological shift necessary for engaging in transcendental phenomenology. Husserl touches on the problem of motivation on many occasions, but it becomes an explicit issue in Fink’s bold reimagining of the transcendental theory of method, as presented in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. In the first section, I briefly introduce the problem as it appears in Husserl. The second section of the paper discusses Fink’s Hegelian dissolution of it. Finally, I point to several historical, practical, and ethical aspects of transcendental phenomenology, and argue that a good account of motivation for phenomenology ought to find a way to address these without hastily bracketing them.