Romain Iborra

PhD – Phenomenology was conceived by its founder, Edmund Husserl, as a science meant to provide all other sciences not only with their foundations, but with their absolute foundations, insofar as the question of phenomenology's own foundations should find its answer within phenomenology itself, or more precisely, within the phenomenology of phenomenology. As the ultimate arcana of science, phenomenology and the phenomenology of phenomenology would unveil a domain situated beneath the opposition between transcendence and immanence, namely the domain of preimmanence. However, by introducing the concept of preimmanence, it turns out that phenomenology and the phenomenology of phenomenology also introduce contradictions at the core of phenomenology. This leads to multiple violations of the principle of non-contradiction, thereby raising the risk that phenomenology might ultimately be merely a discourse that is, to be sure, eminently elaborate, but pseudo-scientific. Consequently, heavy amputations to phenomenology are required to make it consistent, going so far as to sacrifice the entire preimmanent domain, and thus all the concepts supposed to be the most fundamental of science. Nevertheless, before making such a consequential normative use of the principle of non-contradiction against phenomenology, we must pose the question of the legitimacy of demanding that it conform to this "principle" of classical logic. For, according to Husserl, this logic has under its jurisdiction only sciences that make a naive presupposition of the world, so-called "mundane" sciences. Now, phenomenology would be a non-mundane science. By virtue of this radical difference, it would obey, without this undermining its scientific character in any way, its own logic, which Husserl calls "the final logic". It is possible, then, that the final logic does not count the principle of non-contradiction among its laws. Our thesis demonstrates that phenomenology must indeed conform to the principle of non-contradiction and that any contradiction found within it must therefore be eradicated, whatever the cost for Husserlian phenomenology.