Trent asked:

How is the knowledge Husserl obtains in the epochépertinent to the world outside of the
epoché? Is he just examining how we know and then applying that process to how we construct
the outside world?

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Sorry I missed this one before... anyway, look at it this way. Suppose you wanted to wriggle around
Descartes' problem (existence of the world, etc.) and his dualism, ok? Now, one way to do that might
be to say, "The 'existence' of the world is just another thoughtor conceptthat we have when we look
around at 'things', or whatever. What if we just ignoredthat concept and looked around anyway?"
That, in a sort of crude nutshell, is what the epoche is and what it's supposed to do. We look around,
and we merely ignore or "bracket", as Husserl liked to call it (and boy oh boy do I have problems with
this concept, as an act!) the idea that things "actually" exist. Now, are we looking at the "same" world?
Yes, of course we are; no phenomenologist would claim that we're seeing a different world, merely
that we're seeing it in a different way,another matter entirely ("radically" different, as they like to put
it).

Now, does one obtain "knowledge" this way? Is Husserl examining how we know? Well, yes in a
sense he is, in a very abstract way. But he's not so much "constructing" as "deconstructing" the world
(And does that latter term sound familiar? Haha, yes, he started that movement... unwittingly.), i.e.,
showing that when we removesomething, that idea above, we see the same world in what he would
understand as a more profound and complete manner, one which was not occupied with the question
of "existence", but with more important (to him) questions of constitution,i.e., what things are "made
of", as experiences.So, yes, that's knowledge... and Husserl and phenomenologists believe it's
deeper, in a sense, than mere "empirical" knowledge, since it bypasses (so they hold) that question.

But the main goal, of the epoche, anyway, was to solve, by avoiding, the Cartesian dilemma. To go
further, to what he would have considered "real" knowledge, you have to in addition apply the
"phenomenological reduction"... and that's yet anotherlevel of abstraction, which does,according to
Husserl, result in profound knowledge of absolute entities, the philosophical or experiential
equivalents of Platonic ideal objects (and Husserl had problems all his life with whether he was an
idealist or not... but I'm just not going to go there). One might indeed claim that one doesobtain
knowledge of "another" world through that reduction... but again, Husserl would have denied that,
because it is absolute, indubitable (apodictic) knowledge of the "natural", "pre-scientific" world that he
was after.

So the brief answers to your questions, are, first: totally pertinent because it's the same world; and
second: sort of.

But my teeny exposition here just cannot do justice to Husserl's work. First, his own ideas changed
rather radically as he matured, and second, he wrote literally thousands of pages on this stuff (which
the Husserl Archives are still bringing out). With a lot of redundancy, a lot of ranting, and some
absolute sheer brilliance, such as, for example, his analysis of "time consciousness". I don't even
know where to recommend you start reading... there's always the Ideen, but I actually think that the
Logical Investigations are more approachable:

Husserl, E. Logical Investigations.Translated by J.N. Findlay. Vol. I, International Library of
Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge, 2001.

Husserl, E.. Logical Investigations.Translated by J.N. Findlay. Vol. II, International Library of
Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge, 2001.

But again, you just cannot easily compare any of his writings separated by more than a few years,
since his ideas were always changing.

Steven Ravett Brown