The Early Husserl Between Structuralism and Transcendental Philosophy

Phenomenology and structuralism are commonly understood as two opposing and largely incompatible schools of thought. Indeed, if the former is thought of as the philosophy of subjectivity par excellence, and the latter as the tradition in which the “death of man” is declared, it seems difficult to challenge the antagony between them. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that this picture represents an oversimplification and turns out to be, to a great extent, fallacious. The aim of this paper is to show that the philosophy of the early Husserl – notably as exposed in the Logical Investigations – ought to be fully considered as both part of the wide tradition of Transcendental philosophy as well as Structuralism. To this end, the paper mainly addresses Husserl’s notion of Wissenschaftslehre and the mereology developed in the Third logical investigation and, as a result, tries to show how Husserl’s position can be defined in terms of a “phenomenological structuralism” or a “structural phenomenology” or, as I propose, a “transcendental structuralism”.