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Overcoming Positivism: Husserl and Wittgenstein

Zurück zum Heft: Phänomenologische Forschungen 2014
DOI: https://doi.org/10.28937/1000107776
EUR 14,90

In this paper I shall briefly analyze Husserl’s and Wittgenstein’s divergent reactions against the positivist stance on natural science and on the new cultural role that philosophy should play in relation to science. To a great extent, their philosophies can be considered as a departure from positivism, although for quite different reasons. I shall argue that Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, took positivism as a starting point that he tried to overcome from within. This endeavor led him to defend some theses of a pragmatist flavour as well as a peculiar type of radical agnosticism on ontological and epistemological issues. Husserl, however, considered that positivism was a dead-end for philosophy. Positivism has beheaded philosophy as a consequence of advancing a reductive view of science. Phenomenology is the attempt to understand the genetic and subjective processes that have ended up in an objective and scientific image of the world.