Scientific Phenomenology and Bioethics

Abstract

“The fading away of our faith in a universal philosophy as a guide for modern man also means the fading away of faith in reason understood as it was understood in antiquity, when — as episteme — it was deemed opposed to doxa.” So Husserl wrote in his Krisis. Indeed, while experimental and theoretical science was on the point of making discoveries that led men to knowledge of things in both the microcosm and in astrophysics, things that could not even have been suspected up to that time, one could already note in the so-called “pure act” of thought a kind of dissolution that was marked, on the one hand, by the signs of a defeat of the rational case and, on the other, by the subjection of thought to totalitarian and, at times, even magical ideologies.