ABSTRACT
The importance of Husserl’s thought does not reside in the originality of its main themes – which, on the contrary, are extremely traditional – but on the uncompromised radicalness with which it redefines and addresses them. Husserl stands above his contemporaries not for the questions he raised, but for the way in which he turned preexisting intellectual motives into a theoretical framework in which his cultural situation could be understood, criticized, and overcome. The history of the reception of Husserl’s account of natural science in general and the exact sciences of nature in particular is interesting in its own right and constitutes an important strand in the vicissitudes of contemporary philosophy. This chapter reconstructs the evolution of Husserl’s conception of the relation between the theory of knowledge, natural science, and metaphysics from the early 1890s to his Ideas.
