Abstract: Scientific philosophy has a “critical” meaning, from the first-person perspective, and a “dogmatic” meaning, from the third-person perspective. “Objectively” oriented philosophy finds its highest degree of rationalization in symbolic thought, and ultimately in a mathesis universalis. Although its development entails a depletion of its meaning-fundament in the life-world, it serves the purpose of compensating for the finitude of human cognition. Yet critical philosophy, not satisfied with this “natural” orientation, interrogates the essential origin of every positive formal science in finite experience. Husserl's relative concept of evidence is not a skeptical one and does not exclude the idea of “truth in itself.” His “transcendental relativism” refers to the self-responsibility of the radical scientific philosopher bent on the resolution of “all conceivable problems in philosophy,” in an ongoing teleological process of infinite tasks.

Keywords: formalization, critical phenomenology, life-world, philosophical self-responsibility, mathesis universalis

The Twofold Sense of Scientific Philosophy

For Husserl scientific philosophy ultimately has a twofold sense. On the one hand, it is developed within a “subjective” or first-person perspective and is radical or “critical” insofar as it attempts to disclose the philosophical origin of the positive sciences. Thus, it seeks to clarify both how their concepts, laws, and theories, as well as their objects, can become manifest “for us” if they are essentially “in themselves” and how, entering the flux of lived experience, they can be thought, expressed, and applied to experience without thereby losing their objectivity and transcendent meaning.