Abstract
In this paper I will interpret and discuss Husserl’s approach to exact sciences focusing especially on Ideas I (1913), Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), and Crisis (the 1930s). This development shows that: (1) Husserl’s phenomenology is primarily a method (rather than a metaphysical thesis); (2) the method is context-dependent and hence it is not tied to any particular philosophical approach to mathematics or physics; (3) it emphasizes practice in a manner that anticipates more recent philosophical analyses of the scientific practice; and finally (4) its aim is to reveal the metaphysical commitments of scientists, rather than to formulate an argument for any particular metaphysical position. All this conforms to the views of contemporary naturalists in philosophy of science. They hold that philosophers should approach sciences as they are, and hence take the scientific practices as the starting point of the philosophical investigations (as opposed to earlier a priori reflection of what sciences should be like). Accordingly, the paper argues that Husserl’s approach anticipates the naturalistic turn in philosophy of science: he did not engage in building models about what science should be like, instead he described the scientific practice and the normative goals that guide it. However, the task of transcendental phenomenology is to provide a critique of scientific practice as it is. Looked at from the Husserlian point of view, this is what contemporary naturalists are missing, and hence their approach remains philosophically naïve. The paper thus argues that phenomenology provides tools that allow naturalist philosophers of science to make their approach critical and critically philosophical, while retaining the basic naturalist commitments not to accept appeals to the mysterious and to approach sciences as they are.
I wish to thank Sara Heinämaa, Frode Kjosavik, and Philipp Berghofer for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks are also due to Jaakko Kuorikoski and Petri Ylikoski for their help in my quest to find out about the recent developments in philosophy of science.
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Notes
- 1.
I am thinking of the views influenced by, e.g., Arthur Fine’s (1986) natural ontological attitude, new experimentalism, to which Ian Hacking’s Representing and Intervening (Hacking, 1983) gave rise, and the consequent naturalistic localism in philosophy of science. Nowadays it is rather common to think that science is a social institution and a collective process (Giere, 1988). (The development is helpfully described in Ylikoski, 1996, see also Callebaut, 1993).
- 2.
Husserl discusses the role of communication, not in the main text of these lectures, but in the Appendix to §39 of the text, written probably in 1912.
- 3.
Husserl worked in Göttingen from 1901 until 1916 when he moved to Freiburg.
- 4.
This is a much discussed notion in the secondary literature. My view of it and the references for the discussion can be found in Hartimo (2018a).
- 5.
Among philosophers the idea of a preestablished harmony was discussed and defended by, for example, Ernst Cassirer, first in a monograph on Leibniz (Leibniz’ System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen, Marburg, 1902), and later in his Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff: Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik (1910). In contrast, Paul Natorp objected to Minkowski’s interpretation of Lorentz and Einstein on the grounds that he could not accept Minkowski’s idea of a preestablished harmony between mathematical and empirical nature. For more on the various philosophers’ views on the matter, see Pyenson (1982, 148–152).
- 6.
See (Hartimo, 2018c, and Forthcoming a) for more detail about Besinnung and its use in FTL.
- 7.
I explain some of these reasons in detail in Hartimo, 2019b.
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Hartimo, M. (2020). Husserl’s Phenomenology of Scientific Practice. In: Wiltsche, H.A., Berghofer, P. (eds) Phenomenological Approaches to Physics. Synthese Library, vol 429. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46973-3_3
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