Suspension of Judgment and Transcendental Research: Peirce and Husserl on Philosophical Knowledge

Following ancient Pyrrhonists, Husserl called his methodological step from the natural to the phenomenological attitude by the name “epoché,” even if he seemed to be paving the way for philosophical knowledge rather than casting doubts on its possibility. Charles Peirce was also a phenomenologist, although he wished to call his phenomenology by the name “phaneroscopy.” Peirce was also a fallibilist; on his view, all inquiry presupposes that there is an element of doubt in knowledge. Peirce and Husserl were transcendental philosophers, even if in their own ways. The present paper asks how the two philosophers combined the emphasis on uncertainty and suspension of judgment with the belief in the possibility of philosophical knowledge. It argues that in order to understand how skepticism and transcendental philosophy were related in Husserl’s views, we have to consider transcendental and eidetic reductions separately, even if they were intertwined in his thought. Similarly, even if Peirce did not make such a distinction, his phenomenology allows an interpretation in which the two points of view are separated. The paper concludes that Peirce’s and Husserl’s ways of combining skepticism and belief in the possibility of philosophical knowledge differed in that Husserl distinguished between the infallible core of knowledge and its fallible surrounding area, while Peirce emphasized similarities between phenomenology and geometry.