The Crisis of Philosophy and the Meaning of the Sciences for Life

Abstract

Despite the significant number of critical analyses devoted to the subject, the precise definition of the famed crisis-notion that lies at the heart of Husserl's last work remains controversial. The aim of this article is to defend and expand the account of Husserl's notion of the crisis of philosophy and of the resulting crisis of the European sciences that I have developed in a number of publications. This will be done by further exploring the notion of the meaningfulness of the sciences for life as well as its relation to their scientificity. Based on this result, I will then respond to some objections advanced against my proposal, and I will present further arguments to the effect that the crisis of philosophy consists in the collapse of its pretension to be scientific, and the consequent crisis of the European sciences consists in the resulting enigmatic character of their scientificity. Keywords Crisis • Scientificity • Existential significance of the sciencesRecent years have seen several attempts to interpret the key-concepts of Husserl's last unfinished work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl, 1976/1970). 1 Unfortunately, instead of establishing a common framework, these attempts have prompted new controversies, which point to the enduring enigmatic character of one of the most complex theoretical works of the past century (for a discussion of four such controversies, see: Staiti, 2020). Regretfully, there is considerable disagreement even about the very definition of Husserl's famed "crisis-concept". In 2016, I advanced a definition aiming to provide both a unitary account of Husserl's so called multiple "crises" and to situate it within his 1 Henceforth, Krisis followed by the page numbers of the English translation.