Special contribution to the debate

Martin C. Dillon

pp. 179-183

in: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed), The crisis of culture, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1976

Abstract

One of the aims of Husserl’s Crisis is to bring the methods of phenomenology to bear on the tasks of describing and rectifying the crisis he felt was present in European science and culture. The crisis, which Husserl describes in ‘The Vienna Lecture’ as a sickness in the European nations, has its roots in “the apparent failure of rationalism”. More specifically, this failure has to do with the inability of the natural sciences to deal with the human spirit. The sciences, dissociated from their original grounding in philosophy, increasingly specialized, fragmented and compartmentalized, cannot provide what is needful in the “struggle for the meaning of man”.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund