The Concept of the World: From the Husserlian Epistemological Horizon to the Heideggerian Hermeneutical Possibility

Abstract

The phenomenological approach to the lifeworld aims to reveal the structure of world without support on metaphysical speculation or epistemological assumptions, exclusively on the basis of subjective experience and intuition, instances which mark the formal coordinates of the ontological structure of what it means to live in a context. For this reason, the description and explanation of the meaning of the lifeworld presupposes revealing the daily structures of the world of life, the interconnections of the self with others and with the environment not in the sense of a causal system, but more in a sense of a system of possibility of what Martin Heidegger called hermeneutics of the facticity. In this context, the following paper is dedicated to a treatment of the of some of the frequently debated issues in the literature on Husserl and Heidegger by providing phenomenological analyses of world and subjectivity as the respective philosophers viewed this particular relation.

Keywords: Intentionality, being-in-the-world, horizon, referential whole, being-at-hand, epoché