ABSTRACT
In his last work, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, written in the 1930s, Husserl argued that philosophy’s loss of grip on the key notion of Reason as a universal foundation of the very meaning of what it is to be human and on that of there being any assured basis of normative truth was in significant part responsible for the only too evidently looming political and social crisis of the times. It is true that certain lines of argument deeply embedded within the overall tradition of “Western” philosophy have led many leading philosophers to what may be described as a rationally based distrust of Reason itself and a reasoned scepticism as to the existence of any universal norms, and even so-called analytic philosophy, with its insistence on verifiable argument structures, faces major – and perhaps ultimately irresolvable – problems in its efforts to characterise how an embodied and in principle wholly causally explicable human being may yet be able to engage in goal-directive and norm-governed communicative action. It may be that philosophy needs to pay greater attention to the inner connections between rationality, reasonableness and emotions and to the recognition of norms as the universal basis for conceptualising thought and communication of any sort whatsoever.
