Abstract

This article critically reviews an outstanding collection of new essays addressing Edmund Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences. In Science and the Life-World (Stanford, 2010), David Hyder and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger bring together an impressive range of first-rate philosophers and historians. The collection explicates key concepts in Husserl’s often obscure work, compares Husserl’s phenomenology of science to the parallel tradition of historical epistemology, and provocatively challenges Husserl’s views on science. The explications are uniformly clear and helpful, the comparative work intriguing, and the criticisms interesting but uneven. The article also elaborates on Husserl’s phenomenological method as it relates to the historiography of science, and compares his views on mathematical idealisation to more recent work in the analytical tradition.