The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology

Husserl's last work, developed from lectures given in Vienna and Prague in 1935. Parts I and II appeared in 1936; the rest stayed among his papers and was published in 1954. Husserl argues that the European sciences are in crisis, not because they fail technically, but because they have lost their meaning for human life and can say nothing about reason, value or freedom. He traces the problem to Galileo's mathematisation of nature, which put an idealised world of formulas in place of the world we actually perceive. He then follows modern philosophy from Descartes through Hume and Kant as a struggle between objectivism and a transcendental turn to the subject. Against this he sets the lifeworld (Lebenswelt): the pre-scientific world of everyday experience that all science presupposes and then forgets. Part III offers two ways into transcendental phenomenology, one from the lifeworld and one from psychology. Supplements include the Vienna Lecture and the essay on the origin of geometry.

It gave philosophy the idea of the lifeworld and a sharp diagnosis of what science leaves out, and it remains a key source for debates on science, technology and human meaning.