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It has often been noted that the basic difference between Husserl and Heidegger boils down to their different interpretation of the concept of "world." Desan, for example, believes that the world presented to Husserl the familiar epistemological problem of whether or not we are justified in believing in its existence. Heidegger and Sartre, on the other hand, take our being-in-the-world for granted and do not consider it worth questioning on the epistemological level.¹ Consequently, Husserl's method of "bracketing" our belief in the existence of the world by the transcendental-phenomenological reduction should prove to be either superfluous or obnoxious to Heidegger and Sartre. It is indeed true that Heidegger never mentions this reduction (which is sometimes called the "epoché" by Husserl) and that Husserl seems to have been aggrieved by this fact.² But whereas Sartre criticizes Husser's epoché openly,³ matters are not so easy in the case of Heidegger. In fact, Tugendhat has recently suggested that Heidegger did not need to discuss the epoché because his own writings were done from "within" this operation, i.e. because Heidegger performed this operation before he began to write.⁴

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-9999-2_6

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