Both the commonsensical and the philosophical understanding of curiosity as the desire to know display similar ambiguities. In philosophy, such ambiguities have further repercussions, inasmuch as inquiries into curiosity, in addition to being a field of philosophical research in itself, also have meta-theoretical implications concerning the idea of philosophy one embraces. This holds true for Edmund Husserl’s discussion of curiosity: his phenomenological analysis of curiosity as an object of inquiry is crucially connected with a specific meta-theoretical understanding of philosophy as an exploratory endeavor. This article analyses the relevance of the phenomenological analyses of curiosity against the background of the discussion of a polarization in the appreciation of the role of curiosity for philosophy and of the tasks Husserl assigns to philosophy. It focuses on how Husserl’s appraisal of curiosity in philosophy is tied to his concrete analyses of the intentional structure of ordinary curiosity. Crucial for this appraisal and for its meta-theoretical implications is the analysis of the relation between curiosity and the basic structure of intentionality as tendency.

好奇心作为求知欲望的常识和哲学理解都表现出类似的模糊性。在哲学中，这种模糊性会产生进一步的影响，因为对好奇心的探究除了本身是哲学研究的一个领域之外，还对人们所信奉的哲学理念具有元理论含义。这对于埃德蒙德·胡塞尔对好奇心的讨论来说是正确的：他对好奇心作为探究对象的现象学分析与对哲学作为一种探索性努力的特定元理论理解有着至关重要的联系。本文在对好奇心对哲学的作用和胡塞尔赋予哲学的任务的评价中的两极分化的讨论的背景下，分析了好奇心的现象学分析的相关性。它重点关注胡塞尔对哲学好奇心的评价如何与他对普通好奇心的意向结构的具体分析联系起来。对于这种评价及其元理论意义来说至关重要的是对好奇心与作为倾向的意向性基本结构之间关系的分析。