When first reading the Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre a fact jumps immediately to the eye: the ethical reflection is systematically pushed beyond the limits of a merely reflection on ethics. Besides the attempt to draft a doctrine of values, other questions form the core of this investigation: the idea of philosophy, the possibility of a teleology from a phenomenological perspective, the sense of rational acting throughout a variety of modalities – logical, practical, axiological. The foundation of formal ethics must therefore be understood as part of a broader critique of reason, which Husserl himself expounds during the very same years of these Vorlesungen. The result is a thorough review of the method and the intimate ambition of phenomenology to become structured as a science and ultimately as a system.