Gallagher Shaun - Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science

Department of Media, Cognition and Communication & Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

To start with, let us briefly recapitulate the character and motivation for Husserls anti-naturalism. In the long essay Philosophy as Rigorous Science , Husserl describes naturalism as a fundamentally flawed philosophy (Husserl , 39).

But why does Husserl oppose the attempt to implement a thorough naturalistic account of consciousness? Because naturalism in his view is incapable of doing full justice to consciousness. Not only has it - in the shape of experimental psychology - lost sight of (subjective) consciousness (Husserl , 104), but even more importantly, naturalism treats consciousness as a real occurrent entity in the world, that is, it conceives of consciousness as an object in the world, on a par with - though possibly more complex than - volcanoes, waterfalls, ice crystals, gold nuggets, rhododendrons or black holes. But on Husserls view this is unacceptable since consciousness rather than merely being an object in the world, is also a subject for the world, that is, a necessary condition of possibility for any entity to appear as an object in the way it does and with the meaning it has. To put it differently, according to Husserl, the decisive limitation of naturalism is that it is incapable of recognizing the transcendental dimension of consciousness.

One way to interpret Kants revolutionary Copernican turn is by seeing it as amounting to the realization that our cognitive apprehension of reality is more than a mere mirroring of a preexisting world. Moreover, Kant transformed the pre-critical search for the most fundamental building blocks of reality into a reflection on what conditions something must satisfy in order to count as real; what is the condition of possibility for the appearance of objects? With various modifications this idea was picked up by Husserl and subsequent phenomenologists. Indeed, the reason why phenomenologists have emphasized the importance of the first-person perspective and investigated the fundamental structures of consciousness and selfhood in great detail has not been because they considered such an investigation a goal in itself - if so, phenomenology would have remained a form of philosophical psychology or philosophical anthropology - rather the analysis was motivated by transcendental philosophical considerations.

Naturalism is typically distinguished by methodological as well as metaphysical commitments. The methodological commitment amounts to the idea that the right criteria for justification are those found in and employed by the natural sciences. The metaphysical commitment amounts to the monistic view that there is only one kind of thing, namely things with natural properties, so that everything existing is natural. Jointly, the two commitments amounts to the view that everything (including everything pertaining to human life, such as consciousness, culture and history) has to be studied by the methods of natural science (cf. Aikin , 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings, that is, we should aim for a description where all traces of ourselves have been removed. Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have in themselves and the properties which are projected by us. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself.