Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Phenomenolgy and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism

Titel: Phenomenolgy and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism

Stichwort: Kritik 4 an Husserl: Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften; Unterschied: Wissenschaft - Lebenswelt;

Kurzinhalt: And so I do not think that Husserl is accurate when he says that the sciences rest simply on popular notions. What is true is that, when you start questioning scientists, they usually are not very good at philosophy ...

Textausschnitt: 9.4 Science and the Lebenswelt

263a In the fourth place, de facto science does not rest on the evidence and procedures of commonsense living, of the Lebenswelt. There has been a failure to attempt the phenomenology of the scientist or of the phenomenologist. If there were a phenomenology of the scientist, certainly it would note that the scientist does not fit into the 'life scene,' the ideas of common sense on human living. Thales was an oddity, looking at the stars and tumbling into the well. He was not living in the Lebenswelt. Archimedes running naked through the streets shouting, 'I've got it!' was not an ordinary specimen of commonsense humanity. Newton, living absorbed in his problems for days in his room, having his meals brought to him and hardly pecking at them, was not an ordinary specimen of common sense. There is a specific pattern of consciousness, a specific pattern of experience, that characterizes the scientist at work. And so I do not think that Husserl is accurate when he says that the sciences rest simply on popular notions. What is true is that, when you start questioning scientists, they usually are not very good at philosophy, or the philosophy they have is not very good, and they will not be able to give a very good account of themselves. But as Einstein pointed out to epistemologists and theorists of science, 'Don't pay any attention to what the scientists say to you; watch what they do.'1 If you ask them what they are doing and start asking them for their opinions, all they will do is trot out some third-rate theory of knowledge. But if you watch what they do, you will be getting at the facts of scientific inquiry, and that is something quite independent of the third-rate theory of knowledge that any particular scientist may happen to hold. (Fs)

263b Now as far as I know - I have not read all of Husserl, but no one has, as a matter of fact, because a lot of it is still in this queer shorthand of his - Husserl has not done justice to that point. And as well, the subsequent concern with engaged consciousness, consciousness as orientated upon choosing, the flight from any type of intellectualist attitude as though it involved one necessarily in positivism or idealism (which are anathema to the contemporary European), has resulted in a neglect of that field due to a subsequent bias. (Fs)