Phenomenological Reviews

Series | Book | Chapter

146839

Everydayness, historicity and the world of science

Husserl's life-world reconsidered

Dermot Moran(University College Dublin)

pp. 107-131

Abstract

Husserl is credited with introducing the term "life-world ' ( Lebenswelt ) into twentieth-century philosophy. Many European philosophers – including Jan Patočka , Jürgen Habermas , Niklas Luhmann, and Hans Blumenberg – have embraced Husserl 's conception and have integrated it into their own thinking, albeit interpreted in different ways. Husserl introduces the life-world in his Crisis of European Sciences Section 9 (1936) as the "forgotten meaning fundament of natural science" and goes on, in the course of that work, to characterise the life-world in not entirely compatible ways. Despite the large literature on Husserl 's conception written since then, in many ways the concept remains deeply problematic. In this paper, I trace the main contours of Husserl 's concept and I argue that the life-world as the ultimate context and horizon of human experience must be thought of not just as the counterpart of the scientific world, but as the inherently communal world, the world "for others', the world available "for everyone' (für jedermann), the historical world.

Publication details

Published in:

Učník L'ubica, Chvatík Ivan, Williams Anita (2015) The phenomenological critique of mathematisation and the question of responsibility: Formalisation and the life-world. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 107-131

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-09828-9_8

Full citation:

Moran Dermot (2015) „Everydayness, historicity and the world of science: Husserl's life-world reconsidered“, In: L. Učník, I. Chvatík & A. Williams (eds.), The phenomenological critique of mathematisation and the question of responsibility, Dordrecht, Springer, 107–131.