Abstract
For Edmund Husserl the purely perceptual world possesses an unchanging, homogeneous structure. Taking issue with Husserl, this essay isolates a subregion of artificial bodies and processes called the “built world” which lacks the structural stability exhibited by the perceptual world as a whole. The paper goes on to argue that alterations within the built portion of the perceptual world during the late Middle Ages set the stage for insights essential to the “mathematization of nature.” Husser’s account of mathematical physics as an outgrowth of philosophy may be mistaken.
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Notes
David Carr, “Husserl’s Problematic Concept of the Life World” in Frederick Elliston and Peter McCormick (eds.) Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977): 202–212.
See also David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 190–211
Joseph Kockelmans, “Phenomenological Conceptions of the Life World” Analecta Husserliana 20 (1986): 339–355
J. N. Mohanty, “Life World and ‘A Priori’ in Husserl’s Later Thought” Analecta Husserliana 3 (1974): 46–65. For an extremely helpful overview of the life-world concept see Aron Gurwitsch “The Life World and the Phenomenological Theory of Science” in Lester Embree (ed.) Phenomenology and the Theory of Science (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974) pp. 3-32. Also see Elisabeth Ströker, “History and the Life World” in Husserlian Foundations of Science (Washington DC: CARP & UPA, 1987), pp. 123-135.
Edmund Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology, trans. John Scanlon (Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), pp. 38–70.
Ibid., pp. 7–14.
Ibid., p. 70.
Ibid., p. 42.
Ibid., p. 51.
Ibid., pp. 60–1.
Ibid., p. 52
The distinction between bodies as tools and bodies as mere objects, and the primacy of tools, is pointed out with admirable precision by Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie & Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 91–148.
Ibid., p. 52.
Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 39–78.
“The only rotary devices antedating the fourth-century, B.C are the potter’s wheel, the vehicular wheel, the pulley, the bow drill, the bow lathe, and the reel and spindle of the weaver” (Robert Forbes, Studies in Ancient Technology, 2:32–3).
See also Robert Forbes, Studies, 3:139–51
Galileo Galilei, Two New Sciences, trans. Stillman Drake (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1974), p.
Galilei Galileo, De Motu in On Motion and Mechanics, edd. I. E. Drabkin and Stillman Drake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), pp. 13–114.
Since Marx, scholars have been interested in the social origins of scientific insight. The Scientific Revolution, some Marxists argue, was an extension of such things as class interest, free market relations, or the breakdown of barriers between mental and manual labor. This line of inquiry has not, however, met with much success as internalist historians frequently point out. Attempts to connect the cognitive fortunes of basic scientific conceptions with social interest or organization, or with the socio-historical stratum of the L.W., have not led very far. See Rupert Hall, “Merton Revisited” History of Science. 2 (1963): 1–16
Larry Laudan, Progress and its Problems: Toward A Theory of Scientific Growth (Berkeley. Univ. of California Press, 1977), pp. 218–9. For a recent defense of the sociological approach see David Bloor, “Durkheim and Mauss Revisited: Classification and the Sociology of Knowledge” Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 13 (1982): 267-297.
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Davis, H. (1992). Life-World as Built-World. In: Hardy, L., Embree, L. (eds) Phenomenology of Natural Science. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2622-9_3
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