ABSTRACT
Since Quentin Meillassoux’s influential critique of phenomenology, there has been renewed interested in understanding whether phenomenology is antithetical to scientific realism and instead supports versions of scientific anti-realism, whether instrumentalism, van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, or Fine’s Natural Ontological Attitude. This chapter works through the options here and argues against views (like Meillassoux’s and Brassier’s but also endorsed by many phenomenologists) that hold that phenomenology and scientific realism are mutually exclusive or forced into a ‘showdown’. I contend that where a showdown exists it is due to commitments that are sometimes (perhaps often) associated with scientific realism, but are not strictly required by the position (e.g. adopting a view from nowhen; a mechanistic conception of nature and the relation between parts and wholes; an objectivist aim to eliminate or replace the first-person perspective, etc.). Scientific realism does not straightforwardly oppose or contradict the manifest image and phenomenology.
