CATEGORIAL INTUITION AND PASSIVE SYNTHESIS IN HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGY

The aim of this article is to show that Husserl's later analyses of the perceptual syntheses (for instance in Analyses concerning passive and active syntheses) dispense with the notion of categorial intuition, carefully described in the Sixth Logical Investigation (1901). In order to show this result, initially I reconstruct Husserl's notion of categorial intuition described in “Logical Investigations”, relating it to the problem of evident knowledge conceived as intuitive fulfillment of signifying acts. Categorial intuition is founded on simple intuitions, although it cannot be reduced to them. Simple intuitions only offer a global grasping of the intended object, with partial perceptual intentions continually fused therein. In its turn, categorial intuition consists in a new sort of act, the result of a covering synthesis between disclosed partial perceptual intentions and the global perception in which those same intentions had already been operating, although implicitly. It is highlighted that in this synthesis intuition depends on signifying intentions that guide the selection of intuitive aspects to be synthesized. It follows from this that the categorial components of the so called categorial intuition come from outside the very sphere of perception. In contrast with this position, Husserl, in later texts describes, by means of the notion of passive synthesis, the genesis of categoriality in the very realm of sensibility, which allows him to formulate a new approach to clarify the phenomenological sources of knowledge.