The Limits of Abstraction: Towards a Phenomenologically Reformed Understanding of Science

Abstract

Husserl argued that psychology needs to establish an abstraction that is opposite to the abstraction successfully established in the natural sciences. While the natural sciences abstract away the psychological or subjective, psychology must abstract away the physical or worldly. However, Husserl and other phenomenologists such as Iso Kern have argued that there is a crucial systematic disanalogy between both abstractions. While the abstraction of the natural sciences can be performed completely, the abstraction of psychology cannot. In this context, Husserl argues that the psychological reduction leads to paradoxes. In this paper, I critically discuss whether it is true that the natural sciences can successfully abstract away the subjective. Or more precisely, I raise the question of whether they should.