Where Do Centaurs Come From? A Non-standard Reading of Husserl’s Doctrine of Phantasia

Where do centaurs come from? In his 1904-05 lectures, Husserl sketches an an-swer to this question that draws on his original doctrine of phantasy. Centaurs, he argues, result from the phenomenization of phantasy appearances, namely, from their condensation into the image of a perceptual object that may have never been in the real world. In his late masterwork, Phénoménologie en esquisses – Nouvelles fondations (2000), Marc Richir builds on this response to develop a non-standard re-foundation of the phenomenological concepts of epoché and intentionality and of the very project of genetic phenomenology. In this article, I measure Richir’s reading of Husserl’s early doctrine of phantasy against the latter’s subsequent attempts to inte-grate it within the developments of his phenomenology of phantasy and against influ-ential scholarship (Rudolf Bernet and others) that builds on these developments.