EPISTEMOLOGY reality, as a refinement of Descartes’s methodological doubt In several ways he sought to be more radical than Descartes in cutting away from the foundations of philosophy whatever it is possible to doubt First of all, he denied the indubitability of the cogito if that is supposed to affirm the existence of an enduring self rather than just the subject of my present sensations Second, he thought that Descartes took the data of consciousness at their face value, without distinguishing within them between what was actually given in sensation, and what in them was the result of a metaphysical interpretation that tacitly presupposed the existence of an external world, spread out in space and time and subject to a principle of causality (LI 16) The differences that separate Husserl from Descartes are, however, unimportant in comparison with the similarities that bind the two together Both philosophers saw epistemology as the basic discipline, which is prior to all other parts of philosophy and to all empirical sciences Husserl, like Descartes, never doubted two things: the certainty of his own mental states and processes, and the language that he uses to report these phenomena These certainties, they both believe, can survive any doubt about the external world Descartes believed that God could have created my mind, just as it is, without there being any such thing as matter Husserl argued that our awareness of external objects consists in our partial glimpses and contacts with them—our ‘adumbrations’ of them, as he puts it But unless these adumbrations exhibited the order they do, we could not in any way construct objects out of them However, it is perfectly conceivable that this order might be shattered, leaving only a chaotic series of sensations If so, we would cease to perceive physical objects, and our world would be destroyed But consciousness, Husserl argued, would survive such a destruction of the world (Ideas, 49) If my own consciousness is indubitably certain, while the world of matter is essentially dubious, nothing could seem more judicious than to suspend judgement about the latter while concentrating on the accurate description and analysis of the former But Husserl’s epoche, or suspension of judgement, is not the neutral starting point that it appears to be between realism and idealism For the assumption that consciousness can be given expression in a purely private world begs the question against realism from the start Because they separate the content of consciousness from any 163