ABSTRACT
Edmund Husserl, in some exploratory tentative pages, now an appendix to Ideas II, already looking toward the last phase of his work, claims his own research furnishes the “absolute human science” (Ideas II, 365). And phenomenology indeed does aim at such a science. In the midst of a world and a nature undergoing radical revision at the hands of those beings that we are accustomed to assign to the human species, it attempts to think some adequate, orienting version of the human as such, to lay bare an authoritative semantic core, a newly conceived meaning for this being (one that is also but a further unfolding or making explicit of what it already was). Husserl’s ultimate understanding of his own philosophical responsibility entailed allowing humanity as such to appear, thus permitting it to gather itself up so as to undertake responsibly and self-consciously this new, nearly unlimited, global phase of its own existence.
