Toward a phenomenology of reason as foundation of human sciences from “The origin of geometry”

Abstract

The essay tries to present the phenomenology of rational acts, acts that are fundamental, in any case, for science. In the first part the phenomenology of reason is exposed as it appears in the fourth section of Husserl's book Ideas I. In the second part, considering The Origin of Geometry, this phenomenology of reason applied to explanation of historical science, overcoming the relativism in which it is involved, an overcoming that also applies to cultural anthropology. If in the first part reason is revealed as the legitimacy of what is given in itself, in the second part the important elucidation of the apriori of history is exposed with which the historian must count and against which relativism can do nothing. As a conclusion, it is explained how the phenomenology of reason of the first part affects the human sciences.