Husserl and the phenomenology of science

Abstract

The history of philosophy of science has been a wonderfully productive field in recent years, digging into the pre-history of the largely Anglo-American analytic approach that currently dom- inates the work of philosophers of science, and thus stimulating our imaginations about what philosophy of science once was and what it could still become. Much of the historians’ focus has gone into exhuming and exploring the often very nuanced debates of early twentieth-century logical positivists and neo-Kantians. A less-known thread of historical research has also begun to explore the early contributions of Ludwik Fleck as well as the French tradi- tion of history and philosophy of science, both of which have played an important role in shaping the theoretical backdrop for much work now being done in the history and sociology of science. The editors of Science and the life-world: Essays on Husserl’s ‘Crisis of European sciences’ have each already made significant contribu- tions to this latter-most wing of history of philosophy of science. With this volume, however, they open up a new horizon, having collected together a stimulating and highly readable set of essays concerning one of the most striking early twentieth-century at- tempts to develop a comprehensive theory of science from within the phenomenological tradition: namely, Edmund Husserl’s last writings from the 1930s, posthumously gathered together under the title The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenom- enology (hereafter, Crisis).