ABSTRACT
In this essay I want to sketch Husserl’s general philosophical concerns, focusing in particular on his contribution to the critical evaluation of the scientific enterprise. There is the widespread belief that the philosophical traditions in Continental Europe in the twentieth century have been broadly anti-scientific in orientation, and, therefore, it is assumed that Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), since he influenced such European philosophers as Gadamer, Heidegger, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Levinas, Ricoeur, and Derrida, among others, must be an historical source of this anti-scientism.1 On the other hand, Husserl was initially primarily known for his Logical Investigations (1900-1), which, in Germany, provided the deathblow to then current psychologistic interpretations of logic, Frege’s own efforts in the same area being in obscurity at that time.2 Students of the history of analytic philosophy recognise Husserl’s refutation of logical psychologism and his strong defence of the ideal objectivity of propositional contents as on a par with the contribution of Frege in the clarification of the essential nature of logic. Moreover, Husserl belonged to the new wave of logicians at the end of the nineteenth century who fully acknowledged that logic was actually a part of mathematics.3 Thus Richard Rorty correctly links Husserl and Russell together as two paradigmatic figures seeking to recapture the mathematical spirit in philosophy (Rorty 1980:166).4 But even those who acknowledge Husserl’s historical contribution to modem logic hold that, in his later works, he failed to take advantage of the mathematical formalisation of logic in order to analyse the nature of language and thought, and, indeed, strongly opposed the growing technicisation (Technisierung) of the discipline of logic. Furthermore, Husserl’s antipathy to psychologism and to reductive naturalism led him to question the impact of modern mathematical sciences on the human cultural world, so that, in his later work at least, he can be seen as inviting and encouraging the anti-scientism which has come to characterise recent Continental philosophy in general.
