Edmund Husserl: Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man - Lecture

Edmund Husserl

Description:

In this lecture I will venture an attempt to awaken new interest in the oft- treated theme of the European crisis by developing the philosophico-historical idea (or the teleological sense) of European man. 1 In so far as in thus developing the topic I bring out the essential function that philosophy and its ramifications in our sciences have to perform in this process, the European crisis will also be given added clarification.

We can illustrate this in terms of the well-known distinction between scientific medicine and 'naturopathy'. Just as in the common life of peoples the latter derives from naïve experience and tradition, so scientific medicine results from the utilization of insights belonging to purely theoretical sciences concerned with the human body, primarily anatomy and physiology. These in turn are based on those fundamental sciences that seek a universal explanation of nature as such, physics and chemistry.