Husserl on knowing essences: Transworld identity and epistemic progression

Abstract

Husserl's proposed method for knowing the essences of universals, which he calls “free variation,” has been widely criticized for involving viciously circular reasoning. In this paper, I review existing attempts to resolve this problem, and I argue that they all fail. I then show that extant accounts are all guilty of a common mistake: they assume that circularity is inevitable as long as the exercise of free variation presupposes the ability to identify the universal whose essence is in question, that is, the ability to recognize entities as instances of it. I reject this assumption: I argue on both Husserlian and independent philosophical grounds that knowledge of a universal's essence is not required for identifying it, but only for re-identifying it at every possible world in which it is instantiated. I then defend a reading on which free variation's purpose is to move its practitioner from non-essentialistic knowledge of a universal's identity (its actual instantiation-pattern) to essentialistic knowledge of its transworld identity (its instantiation-pattern in every possible world in which it is present). And I show that such a transformation is a non-circular progression from non-modal to modal knowledge.