Husserl’s Phenomenology of Scientific Reason

Abstract

The senior philosophy professor at my university, a friend of 25 years, recently shared his complaint that phenomenology today seems to be stalled and is offering little beyond repeating old insights. He suggested that phenomenology is trapped within the analytic routines of its own conceptual universe, even while being trapped by one's thinking is one of its principal topics. James Dodd' s new book on Husserl disproves such a thesis. Dodd not only reiterates the phenomenological project clearly, he engages a variety of phenomenological topics critical to an adequate historical understanding of modern science, and he carries out his own inquiries, extending Husserlian reflection into new areas. Dodd focuses his study upon the historical character of reason and the idea of the lifeworld as a way into phenomenology, as these topics are developed by Edmund Husserl in his Crisis of the European Sciences and "The Origin of Geometry " ( 1 970). ' Dodd offers lucid accounts in chapters on Galileo, the lifeworld, and the phenomenological reduction. Historicality and the lifeworld are both topics that suggest there is a larger role to be given to the social, one that might "compromise" (p. 66) an overly idealized subjective being such as may be conceived by some phenomenologists; however, Dodd himself is hesitant to challenge phenomenological orthodoxy, despite offering many suggestive readings of phenomenological themes. Dodd describes Husserl's project in the Crisis as an inquiry into "the distance marking out the encounter of thought and being," which is a decent epigraph for phenomenological research (p. 150). Reason is viewed as an accomplished and ongoing cultural project, "the decisive question of our times" (p. 169). Dodd reviews Husserl's account of the paradoxes that reason faces necessarily, and he deepens them with his own understanding. In order to remain rigorous, "Reason