Husserl's early concept of metaphysics as the ultimate science of reality

This article reconstructs the development of Husserl’s definition of metaphysics as the ultimate science of reality in the courses and lectures written up the year 1905. The analysis of these texts casts light on Husserl’s philosophical self-understanding in the wider context of late Nineteenth Century German philosophy as well as on the fundamental role that metaphysical interests played in the development of his thought from its earliest stage. A particular attention is devoted to Husserl’s early views of the relations between theory of knowledge and metaphysics, whose analysis is a necessary preliminary step to address the theoretical issue of the relation between transcendental phenomenology and metaphysics

The telos of consciousness and the telos of world history

This article explores the way in which Husserl’s transcendental idealism reverses the thesis stemming from the naturalistic worldview, according to which the existence of humanity in the universe is a contingent fact. It will appear that the resulting teleological account of the world history does not interfere with the traditional explanations provided by the empirical sciences and that it is a consequence of the teleology inbuilt in the correlation between transcendental subjectivity and the world. The conclusion is reached by analyzing some of Husserl’s text concerning the transcendental role of embodiment and normality

The Crisis of Philosophy and the Meaning of the Sciences for Life

Despite the significant number of critical analyses devoted to the subject, the precise definition of the famed crisis-notion that lies at the heart of Husserl’s last work remains controversial. The aim of this article is to defend and expand the account of Husserl’s notion of the crisis of philosophy and of the resulting crisis of the European sciences that I have developed in a number of publications. This will be done by further exploring the notion of the meaningfulness of the sciences for life as well as its relation to their scientificity. Based on this result, I will then respond to some objections advanced against my proposal, and I will present further arguments to the effect that the crisis of philosophy consists in the collapse of its pretension to be scientific, and the consequent crisis of the European sciences consists in the resulting enigmatic character of their scientificit

Philosophy’s Nature: Husserl’s phenomenology, natural science, and metaphysics

This book offers a systematic interpretation of the relation between natural science and metaphysics in Husserl’s phenomenology. It shows that Husserl’s account of scientific knowledge is a radical alternative to established methods and frameworks in contemporary philosophy of science. The author’s interpretation of Husserl’s philosophy offers a critical reconstruction of the historical context from which his phenomenological approach developed, as well as new interpretations of key Husserlian concepts such as metaphysics, idealization, life-world, objectivism, crisis of the sciences, and historicity. The development of Husserl’s philosophical project is marked by the tension between natural science and transcendental phenomenology. While natural science provides a paradigmatic case of the way in which transcendental phenomenology, ontology, empirical science, and metaphysics can be articulated, it has also been the object of philosophical misunderstandings that have determined the current cultural and philosophical crisis. This book demonstrates the ways in which Husserl shows that our conceptions of philosophy and of nature are inseparable

The Duhem thesis, the Quine thesis and the problem of meaning holism in scientific theories.

Through a detailed analysis of Duhem's writings some light is cast on the relations between holism, underdetermination and theory-ladenness of experimentation. The latter, which results from the need to interpret theoretically what is actually observed during an experiment, plays a key role in Duhem's analysis of the relation between observation and theory. I will argue that the theory-ladenness of experimentation on one hand provides a general argument for the holistic character of theory testing, and on the other renders problematic the thesis that theories are underdetermined by empirical evidence. A tension is found between Duhem's claim that the aim of theory is to save the phenomena and his analysis of the interpretative role of theory in experiments. I suggest how to overcome this difficulty by showing in what sense we can say that theory saves theory-laden phenomena. After stressing the differences between the Duhemian and the Quinean variants of holism, I argue that Quine fails to take into account the importance of the theory- ladenness of experimentation and the implications of Duhem's thought: Quine shares with the Logical Empiricists the belief that it is possible to detach from theories their empirical content. His acceptance of holism has simply the effect of restricting the attribution of empirical content only to conjunctions of many theoretical statements. I analyse and criticise the two notions of empirical content that Quine has developed. Furthermore I argue that there is no general theory-free expression of the experiential implications of a theory, for theories are logically connected to observable events only within local contexts defined theoretically and brought about by the activities of experimenters. Finally I suggest that, in the light of these considerations, the implications resulting from the possibility of rival incommensurable traditions of research should be discussed, rather than Quine's dilemma concerning empirically equivalent systems of the world

Incommensurability and laboratory science

Le but de l’article est d’établir des relations entre, d’une part, la caractérisation générale kuhnienne de l’incommensurabilité comme impossibilité de traduire l’une dans l’autre les taxinomies de théories scientifiques rivales et, d’autre part, la version plus spécifique de l’incommensurabilité proposée par Hacking, laquelle porte sur des théories concurrentes s’étant stabilisées en relation à des équipements de laboratoire et des techniques de mesure différents. Sur la base d’une analyse, inspirée des travaux de Duhem, de la nature des taxinomies scientifiques, on soutiendra que l’approche linguistique kuhnienne est inadéquate pour rendre compte de la manière dont les termes scientifiques s’appliquent à la nature dans le domaine des sciences de laboratoire, au sein desquelles le rôle des opérations de mesure est essentiel. L’analyse introduira la notion de taxinomie duale et celle de caractère ostensif d’une théorie. Il apparaîtra que, une fois ces deux notions prises en compte, il devient possible de poser les bases d’une version taxinomique élargie de l’incommensurabilité, susceptible de fournir un cadre commun pour la discussion des exemples introduits par Kuhn et Hacking.The aim of the article is to establish relations between Kuhn’s general characterization of incommensurability as the impossibility to translate the taxonomies pertaining to rival scientific theories into one another and Hacking’s more specific version of incommensurability affecting competing theories that have stabilized relatively to different laboratory equipments and measurement techniques. On the basis of an analysis of the nature of scientific taxonomies that takes its inspiration from the works of Duhem, it will be argued that Kuhn’s language-based approach is inadequate to provide an account of the way scientific terms apply to nature in the domain of physical laboratory science, in which the role of measurement procedures is essential. The analysis will be carried out by introducing the notion of dual taxonomy and the notion of ostensive character of a theory. It will result that, once these two notions are taken into account, it becomes possible to lay the foundations of an enlarged taxonomic version of incommensurability which can provide a common framework for the discussion of the examples introduced by Kuhn and Hacking

What is the crisis of Western sciences?

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. This article is an attempt to formulate a clear definition of the concept of crisis of Western sciences introduced by Husserl in his last work. The attempt will be based on a reading of the Krisis, which will stress its underlying continuity with Husserl’s life-long concerns about the theoretical insufficiency of positive sciences, and downplay the novelty of the idea of crisis itself within Husserl’s work. After insisting on the fact that, according to Husserl, only an account of the shortcomings of the scientificity of Western sciences can justify the claim that they are undergoing a crisis, it will be argued that the common definition of the crisis of the sciences as the loss of their significance for life rests on a misunderstanding. The crisis of Western sciences will be characterized, instead, as the repercussion of the crisis of the scientificity of philosophy (and, specifically, of metaphysics) on the scientificity of positive sciences. The loss of significance of scientific knowledge for our existence will in turn appear as a further, inevitable consequence of the uprooting of the sciences from the soil of a universal philosophy culminating in metaphysics, and thus, as a phenomenon deeply intertwined with the crisis of Western sciences, but not identical to it

Una passeggiata in mondi e semi-mondi possibili

The object of this article is a particular type of fictional world characterizing a literary genre whose existence and specificities have recently been pointed out by Quentin Meillassoux, namely the extroscientific world. As we shall see, its interest is twofold: metaphysical, because of the difficulty involved in conceiving rigorous examples of it, and literary, because it is hard to find writers who have actually used this type of world as an environment for their stories, and have thus practised the corresponding type of genre. In this article, I will compare the resources offered to the imaginative creation of worlds by three authors: Meillassoux himself, David Lewis, and Edmund Husserl, and I will argue that, thanks to the notion of life-world, Husserl’s thought proves more effective in producing clear and rigorous examples of extro-scientific worlds (or semi-worlds)

Philosophy’s Nature: Husserl’s phenomenology, natural science, and metaphysics

This book offers a systematic interpretation of the relation between natural science and metaphysics in Husserl’s phenomenology. It shows that Husserl’s account of scientific knowledge is a radical alternative to established methods and frameworks in contemporary philosophy of science. The author’s interpretation of Husserl’s philosophy offers a critical reconstruction of the historical context from which his phenomenological approach developed, as well as new interpretations of key Husserlian concepts such as metaphysics, idealization, life-world, objectivism, crisis of the sciences, and historicity. The development of Husserl’s philosophical project is marked by the tension between natural science and transcendental phenomenology. While natural science provides a paradigmatic case of the way in which transcendental phenomenology, ontology, empirical science, and metaphysics can be articulated, it has also been the object of philosophical misunderstandings that have determined the current cultural and philosophical crisis. This book demonstrates the ways in which Husserl shows that our conceptions of philosophy and of nature are inseparable

Il significato metafisico della teoria della conoscenza fenomenologica

Recently, a number of publications (e.g. Tengelyi 2014, Zahavi 2017) have renewed the interest for the relation between phenomenology and metaphysics. This issue appears crucial both for understanding Husserl’s thought per se, and for a systematic appraisal of its relations with post-Husserlian phenomenology as well as with contemporary analytic debates about metaphysics. In this paper, I will argue that, contrary to what Zahavi and other have claimed, metaphysical interests played an essential role even before the Logical Investigations and that, by acknowledging it, we can better appreciate the metaphysical implications of Husserl’s later transcendental idealism. This conclusion will rest on 1) a careful investigation of Husserl’s own different notions of metaphysics and 2) an analysis of his views about the relations betweenmetaphysics and the theory of knowledge