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Husserlian Phenomenology and Scientific Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Joseph Rouse
Joseph Rouse*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy Wesleyan University
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Abstract

Husserl's (1970) discussion of “Galilean science“ is often dismissed as naïvely instrumentalist and hostile to science. He has been explicitly criticized for misunderstanding idealization in science, for treating the life world as a privileged conceptual framework, and for denying that science can in principle completely describe the world (because ordinary prescientific concepts are irreplaceable). I clarify Husserl's position concerning realism, and use this to show that the first two criticisms depend upon misinterpretations. The third criticism is well taken. Nevertheless, this is consistent with Husserl's fundamental claim that the manifestations of things are important to discuss, but are inaccessible to empirical science.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , June 1987 , pp. 222 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

An earlier version of this paper was written with the support of a Summer Research Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I am most grateful to the Endowment for its support.

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