Modernist Style and Contemporary Philosophy

Abstract

In November 1935 Edmund Husserl, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, gave a series of lectures at the German and the Czech Universities in Prague on ‘The Crisis of European Sciences and Psychology’ which later formed the basis of his last work: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (see Carr, 1970: xvii). Three years before his death, reflecting on a lifetime of rapid scientific developments, Husserl wrote:

We make our beginning with a change which set in at the turn of the past century in the general evaluation of the sciences. It concerns not the scientific character of the sciences but rather what they, or what science in general, had meant and could mean for human existence. The exclusiveness with which the total world- view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by the ‘prosperity’ they produced, meant an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. Merely fact- minded sciences make merely fact-minded people. (1970[1936]: 6)