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Husserl's Philosophy of Science and the Semantic Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Thomas Mormann
Thomas Mormann*
Affiliation:
Institut für Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaften 1, Freie Universität, Berlin
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Abstract

Husserl's mathematical philosophy of science can be considered an anticipation of the contemporary postpositivistic semantic approach, which regards mathematics and not logic as the appropriate tool for the exact philosophical reconstruction of scientific theories. According to Husserl, an essential part of a theory's reconstruction is the mathematical description of its domain, that is, the world (or the part of the world) the theory intends to talk about. Contrary to the traditional micrological approach favored by the members of the Vienna Circle, Husserl, inspired by modern geometry and set theory, aims at a macrological analysis of scientific theories that takes into account the global structures of theories as structured wholes. This is set in the complementary theories of manifolds and theory forms considered by Husserl himself as the culmination of his formal theory of science.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , March 1991 , pp. 61 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 The Philosophy of Science Association

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