The quest for valid knowledge in the context of society

David Rasmussen

pp. 259-268

in: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed), The crisis of culture, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1976

Abstract

Some books, some methods, some problematics are perhaps more interesting for the problems they perceive, the issues they uncover, and the dilemmas they make apparent than for the solutions they provide. The Crisis of European Philosophy and Transcendental Phenomenology (hereafter referred to as Crisis) is just such a book. The important question that emerges for the reader of Crisis is whether or not the method can survive in the context in which Husserl wishes to place it, the context of what he perceives as a crisis, the crisis of Western culture itself. One of his themes is, if not at the center of social philosophy, certainly not foreign to it: the manner in which the object of phenomenological analysis has been preconstituted by certain categories of social agreement. Social categories perceived to be significant for the status and character of reason or science then become thematic for phenomenological investigation. Hence, it is not the new method, but the new context1 that becomes important as one ventures in this book beyond experience per se to a consideration of objects which owe their being not simply to the act of constitution by the phenomenological subject, but rather to society and to culture.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund