Edmund Husserl Quotes

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Extreme empiricism is as absurd a theory of knowledge as extreme scepticism. It destroys the possibility of the rational justification of mediate knowledge, and so destroys its own possibility as a scientifically proven theory.

Edmund Husserl
Within this widest concept of object, and specifically within the concept of individual object, Objects and phenomena stand in contrast with each other.

Edmund Husserl
Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people.

Edmund Husserl
We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible.

Edmund Husserl
Without troublesome work, no one can have any concrete, full idea of what pure mathematical research is like or of the profusion of insights that can be obtained from it.

Edmund Husserl
It just is nothing foreign to consciousness at all that could present itself to consciousness through the mediation of phenomena different from the liking itself; to like is intrinsically to be conscious.

Edmund Husserl
In a few decades of reconstruction, even the mathematical natural sciences, the ancient archetypes of theoretical perfection, have changed habit completely!

Edmund Husserl
Psychologically experienced consciousness is therefore no longer pure consciousness; construed Objectively in this way, consciousness itself becomes something transcendent, becomes an event in that spatial world which appears, by virtue of consciousness, to be transcendent.

Edmund Husserl
What is thematically posited is only what is given, by pure reflection, with all its immanent essential moments absolutely as it is given to pure reflection.

Edmund Husserl
When it is actually natural science that speaks, we listen gladly and as disciples. But it is not always natural science that speaks when natural scientists are speaking.

Edmund Husserl
To every object there corresponds an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject.

Edmund Husserl
A new fundamental science, pure phenomenology, has developed within philosophy: This is a science of a thoroughly new type and endless scope. It is inferior in methodological rigor to none of the modern sciences. All philosophical disciplines are rooted in pure phenomenology, through whose development, and through it alone, they obtain their proper force.

Edmund Husserl
For a mind not previously versed in the meaning and right use of the various kinds of words, to attempt the study of methods of philosophizing, would be as if some one should attempt to become an astronomical observer, having never learnt to adjust the focal distance of his optical instruments so as to see distinctly.

Edmund Husserl
Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within.

Edmund Husserl
Natural objects, for example, must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur.

Edmund Husserl
Our capacity to ideate universals in singulars, to have a 'seeing' grasp of a concept in an empirical presentation, and to be assured of the identity of our conceptual intentions in repeated presentation, is presupposed by the possibility of knowledge.

Edmund Husserl
If all consciousness is subject to essential laws in a manner similar to that in which spatial reality is subject to mathematical laws, then these essential laws will be of most fertile significance in investigating facts of the conscious life of human and brute animals.

Edmund Husserl
The term 'scepticism' is commonly used with some vagueness. Ignoring its popular sense, we find that philosophical theories are called 'sceptical' if they try to limit human knowledge considerably and on principle, and especially if they remove from the sphere of possible knowledge wide fields of real being, or such especially precious sciences as metaphysics, natural science, or ethics as a rational discipline.

Edmund Husserl
First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must "once in his life" withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting.

Edmund Husserl
Pure phenomenology claims to be the science of pure phenomena. This concept of the phenomenon, which was developed under various names as early as the eighteenth century without being clarified, is what we shall have to deal with first of all.

Edmund Husserl
A primitive logical principle can of course not presuppose a notion like 'normality', since this cannot even be formulated without regard to such a principle.

Edmund Husserl
In all the areas within which the spiritual life of humanity is at work, the historical epoch wherein fate has placed us is an epoch of stupendous happenings.

Edmund Husserl
The ideal of a pure phenomenology will be perfected only by answering this question; pure phenomenology is to be separated sharply from psychology at large and, specifically, from the descriptive psychology of the phenomena of consciousness.

Edmund Husserl
The worst objection that can be made to a theory, and particularly to a theory of logic, is that it goes against the self-evident conditions for the possibility of a theory in general.

Edmund Husserl
To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.

Edmund Husserl