Essai

Sartre, intentionality and praxis

Roy Elveton

In January, 1939, one year after the death of Edmund Husserl, Sartre published a short essay entitled “Husserl’s Central Idea.” In the space of a few paragraphs, Sartre rejects the epistemology of Descartes and the neo-Kantians and their view of consciousness’s relationship to the world. Consciousness is not related to the world by virtue of a set of mental representations and acts of mental synthesis that combine such representations to provide us with our knowledge the external world. Husserl’s intentional...