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Husserl's Later Philosophy of Natural Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Patrick A. Heelan
Patrick A. Heelan*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at Stony Brook
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Abstract

Husserl argues in the Crisis that the prevalent tradition of positive science in his time had a philosophical core, called by him “Galilean science”, that mistook the quest for objective theory with the quest for truth. Husserl is here referring to Göttingen science of the Golden Years. For Husserl, theory “grows“ out of the “soil” of the prescientific, that is, pretheoretical, life-world. Scientific truth finally is to be sought not in theory but rather in the pragmatic-perceptual praxes of measurement. Husserl is faulted for taking measuring processes to be “infinitely perfectible“. The dependence of new scientific phenomena on the existence of prior “prescientific” inductive praxis is analyzed, also Husserl's residual objectivism and failure to appreciate the hermeneutic character of measurement. Though not a scientific (theory-)realist, neither was he an instrumentalist, but he was a scientific (phenomena-)realist.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , September 1987 , pp. 368 - 390
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I want to acknowledge with gratitude the helpful discussions I have had with Joseph Kockelmans, Robert Sokolowski, Donn Welton, Claude Evans, and many graduate students at SUNY, Stony Brook.

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