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Journal #J-05/2003
Husserl's View of the Life-World and the World of Science
Frode Kjosavik
Department of Economics & Social Sciences
Agricultural University of Norway
PO Box 5033, N-1432 Ås, Norway
http://www.nlh.no/ior/
e-mail: frode.kjosavik@ior.nlh.no  

Kjosavik, F. (2003): "Husserl's View of the Life-World and the World of Science", Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 57(2):193-202.

Abstract:
In my article, I discuss the relation between science and the life-world as this is conceived of in Husserl's phenomenology. I focus primarily on geometry, to shed light on what I take to be certain shortcomings in Husserl's view of idealization. It is argued that idealization is to some extent constitutive not only of scientific experience but also of life-world experience at the most fundamental level, in the sense of schematization, and not merely sedimentation. A distinction is made between technical and schematic construction, where the latter comprises idealized geometrical operations, and it is argued that the schematic constructs are intertwined with our perceptions in a way that rules out any founding of higher order acts on lower order ones. This means that Husserl's general theory of founded "intuitions" and "eidetic variation" is not able to deal adequately with quasi-perception of shapes. Furthermore, I claim that there is nothing in idealized physical experimentation that is analogous to the schematic construction of geometry, or to its potential structuring of perceptual experience, nor do experiments or theoretical entities of physics possess the normative ideality of "types" in relation to "tokens." It follows that it is difficult to work out a uniform theory of how scientific developments relate to our life-world in general, because in some cases they may influence our further life-world experience in a more radical manner than in others, as in the case of Euclidean demonstrative geometry. Finally, it is suggested that whereas the life-world in Husserl's Krisis takes precedence over the world of science, in Kant's Opus postumum it is rather the other way around, and Kant's notion of "appearances of appearances" is brought in to justify this.

Key words: Idealization, life-world, type-token, geometry, phenomenology, Husserl, Kant

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