EPISTEMOLOGY non-contingent link with its expression in language and its objects in the external world, both Husserl and Descartes find themselves trapped into a form of solipsism, from which Descartes tries to escape by appeal to the veracity of God, and Husserl, in his later years, by postulating a transcendental consciousness The line of argument that drove Husserl to become a transcendental idealist went as follows His starting point was the natural one that consciousness is part of the world, with physical causes But if one is to avoid having to postulate, like Kant, a Ding an Sich which is unattainable by experience, one must say that the physical world is itself a creation of consciousness But if the consciousness that creates it is our own ordinary psychological consciousness, then we are confronted by paradox: the world as a whole is constituted by one of its elements, human consciousness The only way to avoid the paradox is to say that the consciousness that constitutes the world is no part of the world but is transcendental.1 The world that consciousness creates, however, is shaped not only by our own experiences but by the culture and fundamental assumptions in which we live: what Husserl calls ‘the life-world’ The life-world is not a set of judgements based on evidence, but rather an unexamined substrate underlying all evidence and all judgement However, it is not something ultimate and immutable Our life-world is affected by developments in science just as science is rooted in our life-world Hypotheses get their meaning through their connection with the life-world, but in their turn they gradually change it In a paper first published in 1939, Experience and Judgement, Husserl wrote: everything which contemporary natural science has furnished as determinations of what exists also belongs to us, to the world, as this world is pregiven to the adults of our time And even if we are not personally interested in natural science, and even if we know nothing of its results, still, what exists is pregiven to us in advance as determined in such a way that we at least grasp it as being in principle scientifically determinable It is not easy to see how to reconcile these late thoughts with the earlier stages of Husserl’s thinking Similarly, readers of Wittgenstein’s latest Here I am indebted to Herman Philipse’s article ‘Transcendental Idealism’ in CCH 239–319 164