Idealizing the life-world in the age of discovery

Abstract

This article discusses “mathematization of the world” as it was elaborated by Edmund Husserl who focuses on the figure of Galileo and his rediscovery of the heliocentric system in the seventeenth century. The author argues that the latter event became definitional not only for the formation of ideal objectivity but for a wide spectrum of relations between natural sciences and the life-world. Umberto Eco provides a literary exemplar of this thesis, demonstrating that idealization of the physical body carried out by Galileo found its match in the Aristotelian telescope invented to create ideal subjectivity.