Season one of our podcast continues with another panel presentation from the British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference in 2016.
Season 1 episode 4: 9 December 2016
This recording is of Emiliano Trizio’s presentation ‘Science, Metaphysics and the Crisis of Rationality’. You can listen to this episode on the BSP’s Podbean site, and you can also find it on iTunes and all good podcasting apps by searching ‘BSP Podcast’.
Abstract: “In this paper I criticize some of the current interpretations of Husserl’s notion of a crisis of Western sciences and provide an alternative reading that fits into Husserl’s overall theory of science. First, I highlight Husserl’s two preliminary constraints on the notion of crisis: 1) a science can be said to be in a crisis, only if its scientificity has become questionable; and, 2) the prima facie scientificity of (most of) our sciences is not questionable. This implies that what Husserl is looking for is a deeper sense of scientificity that, instead, has become questionable. This allows criticizing the common account of the crisis of sciences as “the loss of their meaning for life”, for the latter notion, while referring to a real and crucial phenomenon cannot be equated with a crisis of scientificity. It will appear that this perceived loss, which Husserl is far from denying, is used by Husserl as a starting point for a historical illustration of the fact that our sciences are just a residue of the idea of a universal philosophy culminating in a metaphysics that did bestow upon them significance for life. This will make possible to answer the crucial question underlying Husserl’s text: “how did the demise of the idea of universal philosophy impact the scientificity of the sciences?” The answer is worked out through a survey of part II of the Krisis, which highlights that what has become enigmatic is precisely the domain of being that they take as object. This fact constitutes the questionability of their deeper or authentic scientificity, and, thus, their real crisis. I conclude briefly outlining the relations between the crisis of metaphysics, the crisis of the sciences, and the general crisis of Western rationality.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at The International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK during September, 2016. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found here.