A Revealing Parallel Between Husserl’s Philosophy of Science and Today’s Scientific Metaphysics

Abstract

One of the central motivations for Husserl to develop his transcendental phenomenology is what he perceives as the crisis of the sciences of his time (physics in particular), which have forgotten their meaning-fundament by substituting the life-world with mathematically structured idealities and mistaking the latter for true being. It thus seems that Husserl would have had little sympathy for today’s attempts to draw metaphysical conclusions from highly mathematized scientific theories within the project known as scientific metaphysics. Nevertheless, I argue in this chapter that there is an important parallel between Husserl’s approach to science and the currently most influential version of scientific metaphysics. As a consequence, I will show that a certain line of criticism against Husserl’s phenomenology holds important lessons for the contemporary debate on scientific metaphysics.