Husserl's proposed method for knowing the essences of universals, which he calls “free variation,” has been widely criticized for involving viciously circular reasoning. In this paper, I review existing attempts to resolve this problem, and I argue that they all fail. I then show that extant accounts are all guilty of a common mistake: they assume that circularity is inevitable as long as the exercise of free variation presupposes the ability to identify the universal whose essence is in question, that is, the ability to recognize entities as instances of it. I reject this assumption: I argue on both Husserlian and independent philosophical grounds that knowledge of a universal's essence is not required for identifying it, but only for re‐identifying it at every possible world in which it is instantiated. I then defend a reading on which free variation's purpose is to move its practitioner from non‐essentialistic knowledge of a universal's identity (its actual instantiation‐pattern) to essentialistic knowledge of its transworld identity (its instantiation‐pattern in every possible world in which it is present). And I show that such a transformation is a non‐circular progression from non‐modal to modal knowledge.

中文翻译：

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胡塞尔论认识本质：跨世界同一性和认识论进展

胡塞尔提出的了解共相本质的方法，他称之为“自由变异”，因涉及恶性循环推理而受到广泛批评。在本文中，我回顾了解决这个问题的现有尝试，我认为它们都失败了。然后我表明，现有的解释都犯了一个常见的错误：他们认为，只要自由变异的运用预先假定有能力识别其本质受到质疑的普遍性，即有能力将实体识别为循环，循环就是不可避免的。它的实例。我拒绝这个假设：我在胡塞尔和独立的哲学基础上都认为，识别普遍性的本质并不需要了解它，而只是在它被实例化的每个可能世界中重新识别它。然后，我捍卫一种解读，其中自由变异的目的是将其实践者从对普遍性身份（其实际实例化模式）的非本质主义知识转移到对其跨世界身份的本质性知识（其在每个可能世界中的实例化模式）。存在）。我证明这种转变是从非模态知识到模态知识的非循环进展。