ABSTRACT
There is a quite different significance to the critical demands made of the sciences from within. Edmund Husserl noted at the start of his best know, if not his major, work, that “positivism as it wre decapitates philosophy.” The “promises” of science do not escape him. With the progressive and increasingly perfect ability of knowing everything, man also pursues an ever more perfect dominion over his surrounding, practical world, a dominion widened through infinite progress. The first, basic critique of Husserl against modern science thus concerns its exorbitant “promises,” its geometricizing enthusiasm, and ultimately its claim to omniscience. The Crocean and Gentilean neoidealists, many of whom in postwar Italy went back on themselves and went to swell the ranks of orthodox Marxists, tolerated the sciences as at most complexes of classificatory concepts, not without a certain practical utility, but essentially as “inferior means of intellectual life”.
