Husserl and the Sciences, Richard Feist ed.

Bibliographic info

Husserl and the sciences:selected perspectives

ISBN 0-7766-3026-1

B829.5 H87 2003

University of Ottawa

Book notes

Edmund Husserl and the history of classical foundationalism, by Herman Philipse

Philipse makes a point to use historical context to analyze the epistemology of a subject. E.g., he wants to know if Husserl's foundationalism was justified in its time.

Foundationalism in general is a classical epistemology that posits that there are some basic beliefs on which we can depend to build more knowledge. As he considered microscopic theories, Descartes suggested that such first principles are "innate in the mind" because they are not directly empirical. Descartes also wrote that experience could be deduced from first causes, the pursuit of which was the duty of natural philosophers. But soon after began a period of empiricism that kept refuting principles and brought the idea of first principles into question. Still, Philipse points out, there were foundationalists such as Kant who thought there were principles born of our "epistemic mechanism" from which we could derive causality and other ideas, afterwards disproven by relativity and quantum physics.

So, Philipse cites Husserl's theories that depend on there being foundational laws that require no grounding in more foundational laws, therefore can be seen as first principles. In math these were laws which were proved by concepts stated in the laws themselves. A problem arose for Husserl, when considering natural sciences, that there were many laws without foundation, tied together into disciplines based on subjects of study, like astronomy.

Philipse ends with an abbreviated discussion of Husserl's "regional ontologies," and then an argument that seeing sciences and their knowledge-acquiring structures as internally competitive is a way to analyze them without worrying about whether they are obeying any first principles.