Ebook: Nature’s Suite: Husserl’s Phenomenological Philosophy of the Physical Sciences

Edmund Husserl, founder of the phenomenological movement, is usually read
as an idealist in his metaphysics and an instrumentalist in his philosophy of
science. In Nature's Suit, Lee Hardy argues that both views represent a serious
misreading of Husserl's texts.
Drawing upon the full range of Husserl's major published works together
with material from Husserl's unpublished manuscripts, Hardy develops a consistent
interpretation of Husserl's conception of logic as a theory of science, his
phenomenological account of truth and rationality, his ontology of the physical
thing and mathematical objectivity, his account of the process of idealization in
the physical sciences, and his approach to the phenomenological clarification
and critique of scientific knowledge. Offering a jargon-free explanation of the
basic principles of Husserl's phenomenology, Nature's Suit provides an excellent
introduction to the philosophy of Edmund Husserl as well as a focused
examination of his potential contributions to the philosophy of science.
While the majority of research on Husserl's philosophy of the sciences focuses
on the critique of science in his late work, The Crisis of European Sciences, Lee
Hardy covers the entire breadth of Husserl's reflections on science in a systematic
fashion, contextualizing Husserl's phenomenological critique to demonstrate that
it is entirely compatible with the theoretical dimensions of contemporary science.
LEE HARDY is a professor of philosophy at Calvin College, Grand Rapids,
Michigan. He is the author of The Fabric of This World, coeditor of Phenomenology
of Natural Science, and the translator of Edmund Husserl's The Idea of
Phenomenology in the Collected Works of Edmund Husserl.
"Lee Hardy's study of Husserl is an outstanding achievement. The argumentation
is crisp and clear throughout, and the discussion of primary and secondary
texts is lucid and detailed. Above all, he makes a very good case for
an important point that is highly relevant to the current resurgence of interest
in phenomenology. Against the tendency of many other interpretations, he
shows how Husserl's phenomenology is in principle compatible with a realistic
understanding of modern scientific theories." —Karl Ameriks,
McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dam