Suspension of Phenomenological Judgement of Scientific Naivety

Abstract

The article addresses the negative judgements on natural sciences, however persistent and frequent they may be, found scattered in the philosophical texts of the two founding fathers of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. It first presents these harsh views and then, by assuming the phenomenological method, advocated by both philosophers, endeavours to suspend these judgements in favour of a phenomenologically more adequate description of the scientific comportment, trying to do justice to its non-philosophical excellence. The basic claim of the treatise is that Husserl's and Heidegger's criticisms should only be understood in the defensive sense of procuring a firm and safe ground for theoretical comportment, bios theoretikos. Such an approach, however, begs for a phenomenological description of the intrinsic excellence of science, which might be phenomenologically most accurately understood as most rigorous practical comportment, as bios praktikos.