The Crisis of European Sciences

Introduction

Husserl, excluded from German academic life under the Nazis, developed the work from lectures he gave in Vienna and Prague in 1935. The first two parts appeared in 1936 in Philosophia, a journal published in Belgrade; the unfinished whole was edited only in 1954. Husserl diagnoses a crisis not of scientific results but of their meaning for human life. Since Galileo, whom he calls a genius who discovers and conceals at once, nature has been treated as a mathematical manifold, and the “lifeworld” of everyday experience, from which all science starts, has been forgotten. The late concept of the lifeworld was taken up by Schütz, Merleau-Ponty and Habermas.

Connections

Criticizes

• Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems1632 · Galileo Galilei

More works by Edmund Husserl

• 1900Logical Investigations
• 1913Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology
• 1931Cartesian Meditations