Abstract
The latest swing of the pendulum has taken philosophy from excessive confidence in our rational powers to an equally excessive mood of relativism. Many contemporary philosophic movements have in common the conviction that our rational categories are contingent products of history, and that all truths are therefore relativized by their historical horizons. Often referred to as “post-modernist,” these movements are in fact the logical outcome of the specifically modern tendency to construe reason as a purely adaptive mechanism. Husserl clearly discerned the irrationalism underlying the two most powerful theses of modernity, naturalism and historicism. His critique of these reductive theses is closely linked with his project of restoring confidence in cognitive intuition.
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Notes
See, for example, Jerry A. Fodor, The Language of Thought (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), p. 9.
John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), viii-ix, and p. 230.
See, for example, Derrida, Of Grammatology trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 48–50.
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Cobb-Stevens, R. (1990). Reason and History. In: Husserl and Analytic Philosophy. Phaenomenologica, vol 116. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1888-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1888-7_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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