I investigate the idea of science elaborated by Edmund Husserl in his later works, first of all, in Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis of European Sciences. The first part of this investigation has been published in the paper: Edmunda Husserla idea nauki i projekt fenomenologii jako nauki ścisłej [Edmund Husserl’s Idea of Science and the Project of Phenomenology as a Strict Science], Filozofia i nauka. Studia filozoficzne i interdyscyplinarne, 2019, 7 (2), pp. 247–264. Husserl claims that the transformation of philosophy into a strict science, which is the basic aim of his intellectual enterprise, is connected with a reform of all the positive sciences. Positive science is closely related to philosophy—both they have a common grounding and ideal. The paper also compares Husserl’s project of philosophy as a fundamental science with the today trends in philosophy and the plurality of its schools, attitudes, fields of problems and methods.
I investigate Husserl’s long-term research on revealing/constructing a proper idea of science. For Husserl this idea was of tremendous importance: it had to be the basis of forming a (the) proper philosophy (phenomenology), that is, a philosophy which was to be an exact science, a new and higher form of science. According to Husserl, the idea of science is not a free project of individual researchers, scientific communities, but the very essence of science—changeless, universal, nontransformable, non-culturally and socially loaded, ahistorical, and non-relativized to scientific praxis. It was attempt to determine a new status of philosophy which led Husserl’s to the consideration of a universal idea of science.
According to Nicolai Hartmann, the correlativistic prejudice is the claim that a being must be a correlate of a subject, and this, he argues, is the main prejudice of Husserl’s phenomenology taken as an eidetic science of transcendental consciousness with its correlates. In contrast to Hartmann, the author of this article claims that Husserl’s conception of the noetic-noematic correlation does not lead to the correlativistic prejudice. Husserl distinguishes between two concepts of object: the noematic ‛object simpliciter’ (the pure X) and the ‛object in the How of its determinations’ (a noematic sense), and he demonstrates that the noematic ‛object simpliciter’ transcends the limit of actual noetic-noematic correlation, it is a correlate of the Idea in the Kantian sense of the term and this idea cannot be intrinsically given in its content. In the article the author shows that Husserl’s concept of the noematic ‘object simpliciter’ as a pure X is similar to Kant’s concept of transcendental object as ‛something in general = X’. In analogy to a transcendental object, noematic ‛object simpliciter’ is partially knowable and it appears to be an irrational fact in its unknowable rest. As a consequence, the ‛object simpliciter’ is something more than a correlate of consciousness and retains always its extra-noematic content. Therefore, the world is only partially correlative to the possibility of experience.
The article is an attempt to define reduction – a phenomenological methodological device – as the beginning of philosophy. The author considers such questions as: What motivates a phenomenologist to do reduction? Can one speak of philosophy before reduction? What is the essence of reduction? To answer these questions the author refers to Edmund Husserl and Jan Patočka, and tries to show that reduction is to be understood as an unmotivated expression of philosopher’s determination to overcome evidence inherent to natural attitude. The author argues that reduction enables one to perform a conceptualization of the world as such. Finally, reduction is defined as an attempt to take thinking seriously.