The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the Natural Sciences —Juxtaposition or Cooperation?

Abstract

The juxtaposition of phenomenology and the natural sciences penetrates the whole of Husserl’s philosophy. Originally manifested in Logische Untersuchungen (expressed through the opposition of a purely phenomenological substantiation of logic, epistemology, and all empirical, in particular, biologistic and psychologistic substantiation)* (1, Ch. IX, para. 52–55), it figures in Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Fünf Vorlesungen. (2, pp. 17–19; 79–80); it is developed in detail, as it is applied to different disciplines, and to the human spirit in general, in his article “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft”; then it is taken up in the works of the 1920s and finally spills over into his discussion in the 1930s of the subject of naturalism as an extensive historical, intellectual, moral, and cultural phenomenon particularly in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (3, p. 126 and ff., p. 294 and ff.).