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Abstract

In this article, I explore the limitations inherent in any attempt to create the kind of rapproachment between phenomenology and neuroscience attempted by Charles Laughlin and C. Jason Throop in this issue. A review of Edmund Husserl's disaffection with natural scientific explanations of consciousness, focusing specifically on Husserl's critique of psychologism, reveals the theoretical problems inherent in a neuroscience blind to the insights of phenomenology. A natural scientific foundation for consciousness entails the skepticism and relativism of psychologism, and, from the phenomenological point of view, such can be avoided only if the categories of natural science are radically founded in the phenomenological life-world. Under such a phenomenological founding, the illumination of human experience, both personal and interpersonal, becomes the most basic philosophic and scientific task.

Keywords

Husserl naturalism neuroscience phenomenology psychologism

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References

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