ABSTRACT
Husserl thought that there were real philosophical problems and that philosophy's "inextinguishable" and cultural task was to answer them. He considered it a cultural crisis that this task had been abandoned. Relativism and irrationalism were symptoms of such a crisis, but he remained convinced that its root was the replacement of philosophical inquiry by empirical science. The appeal to "seeing" and "intuition" becomes deeply misleading, therefore. To "see" a conclusion as inconsistent or a claim as incoherent is to grasp the reasoning involved. It is only a well-worn metaphor that uses the verb "to see" in such a context. Whether he was correct about these historical claims, Heidegger was quite justified in challenging those contemporaries, for instance, who thought the techniques of advanced formal logic would transform any metaphysical or ontological dispute into some simple syntactic confusion. A philosophical tradition requires an open horizon issues, and possible clarifications.
