Husserl's confrontation with ethical skepticism in his development of a pure ethics

Abstract

The paper examines Husserl's argumentation against empiricist and psychologists theories of ethics. As conceived by Husserl all of them converge to a skeptical praxis. Thus skepticism is also an obstruction to the consistent development of pure ethics such as proposed in Husserl's Vorlesungen (1908-1914). Aiming to turn ethics into a pure and a priori science of practical reason Husserl concentrates his effort in the task of to show a kind of auto-invalidation performed by practical skepticism. By means of analogical comparison with Prolegomena's refutation of logical skepticism Husserl aims to show that practical skepticism also falls into a similar contradiction.