Addressing his audience in the Amphitheatre Descartes at the Sorbonne in 1929, Husserl said that "one might almost call transcendental phenomenology a neo-Cartesianism',¹ and he went on to name the book that grew out of the Paris lectures the Cartesian Meditations. To be sure, like most of Husserl's many homages to Descartes, this one is qualified:'…even though [phenomenology] is obliged… to reject nearly all the well-known doctrinal content of the Cartesian philosophy'. But this qualification is further expanded upon by a sort of counterqualification that is also typical of Husserl's remarks on Descartes: phenomenology is so obliged "precisely by its radical development of Cartesian motifs'.