Husserl’s Phenomenology of Scientific Practice

Abstract

In this paper I will interpret and discuss Husserl’s approach to exact sciences focusing especially on Ideas I (1913), Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), and Crisis (the 1930s). This development shows that: (1) Husserl’s phenomenology is primarily a method (rather than a metaphysical thesis); (2) the method is context-dependent and hence it is not tied to any particular philosophical approach to mathematics or physics; (3) it emphasizes practice in a manner that anticipates more recent philosophical analyses of the scientific practice; and finally (4) its aim is to reveal the metaphysical commitments of scientists, rather than to formulate an argument for any particular metaphysical position. All this conforms to the views of contemporary naturalists in philosophy of science. They hold that philosophers should approach sciences as they are, and hence take the scientific practices as the starting point of the philosophical investigations (as opposed to earlier a priori reflection of what sciences should be like). Accordingly, the paper argues that Husserl’s approach anticipates the naturalistic turn in philosophy of science: he did not engage in building models about what science should be like, instead he described the scientific practice and the normative goals that guide it. However, the task of transcendental phenomenology is to provide a critique of scientific practice as it is. Looked at from the Husserlian point of view, this is what contemporary naturalists are missing, and hence their approach remains philosophically naïve. The paper thus argues that phenomenology provides tools that allow naturalist philosophers of science to make their approach critical and critically philosophical, while retaining the basic naturalist commitments not to accept appeals to the mysterious and to approach sciences as they are.