Husserl’s Crisis Text and the Spatial Turn in Philosophy of Science

Abstract

The Crisis marks the culmination of Husserl’s Genetic Phenomenology and the beginning of a new philosophy of science, one that viewed science not as a fact but as a problem that needed philosophical understanding. For Husserl, the crisis of Galilean Science is borne out of the severance of its relation to the world of people’s lives and the erroneous identification of “Nature” with its constituted mathematical or quantifiable object. In the phenomenological philosophy of science, science is a tradition formed through human praxis, like any other cultural enterprise. Objectivity in scientific praxis is a regulative principle constituted by the consensus of judgements of the scientific community. The continuity of scientific knowledge’s unity of propagated transference of meaning shows how its sedimentation carried through language. Despite the scientific world being ontologically grounded in the life-world, Husserl sought to preserve the autonomy of both worlds. To fully appreciate the implications of Husserl’s contribution to the philosophy of science, this paper identifies the “spatial turn” that Husserl introduced through his “less mathematical, more physical” notion of life-world with the 90° shift in the social studies of science that Latour proposed. The life-world combines “Nature” and “Society” as a sole ontological entity that gives rise to science, moving away from a one-dimensional science that kept the ontology of science grounded in one of those poles alone. Despite the limits of Husserlian phenomenological epistemology, Crisis radically departed from positivism, the then-official philosophy of science, embracing historicity and language to broaden our discourse on science and even coming close to certain later developments in the Philosophy of Science. Husserl’s meditations on spatiality also urged a transition to the contemporary understanding of space, opening up possibilities of dialogue with Foucault.