1. Even here and despite Husserl's obvious debt to Descartes, comparisons can be misleading. Because Descartes failed to elaborate the intentional character of consciousness, it was possible for him to posit the ego as a metaphysically insolubleres.Of the many other points where comparisons break down the most striking, of course, is to be found in Descartes' “Third Meditation” where the methodological power of thecogitois augmented by a metaphysically determined principle of causality. Needless to say, this completely disappears in Husserl.
2. Rudolf Boehm,Vom Gesichtspunkt der Phänomenologie(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), p. 75.
3. An analysis of this feature of intentional life would require a detailed examination of the phenomenological concepts of horizon, motivation, and anticipation (v. Ideas, secs. 44, 82).
4. Husserl has in mind Kant's definition of an idea of reason as that to which “no corresponding object can be given in experience”(Critique of Pure ReasonB383).
5. Heidegger, for example, immediately comes to mind. Through the transformation of intentionality from an “awareness of” into the openness of a “caring for,” the Husserlian order is reversed: intentionality—ontically understood—is made possible by transcendence—ontologically understood.