fluenced by Husserl, dedicated to him the first edition of his
magnum opus Being and Time( 1927 ). (He retracted the dedi-
cation after the Nazis came to power, when Husserl, as a Jew,
was removed from his teaching position.)
Phenomenology derives its name from the Greek verb
phainomein,“to appear.” The phenomenologist studies ap-
pearances: how we perceive the world, and how our acts of
perception provide the basis for our understanding of life.
Husserl intended phenomenology as a way of making philos-
ophy return to its authentic vocation: the close consideration
of how human knowledge is possible, and of how we live our
lives as thinking and perceiving beings.
Husserl saw a grave danger for philosophy in scientific
naturalism, which is as current now as it was in Husserl’s era.
Naturalism (in the sense of the word that Husserl relies on)
tries to explain human experience, including mental events, in
terms of natural processes. (Cognitive science, now a serious
influence in many disciplines, is a leading form of naturalism.)
As Husserl saw it, naturalism had not established a truly sci-
entific basis for itself; it was rooted in experimental results,
rather than reason, and therefore could not develop a coherent
picture of the mind.
Husserl vowed to base his philosophy neither in the lan-
guage of natural science favored by naturalism, nor in what he
saw as the mythic hypotheses of psychology—nor, finally, in
the ready observations of common sense, so often proved
faulty by philosophers from Socrates on. Instead, he searched
for a realm that could be the basis for both science and every-
day experience: two ways of understanding that usually seem
to be divided from each other. Although Husserl’s thought
may at first glance seem abstract and unbending, it is in fact a
metaphysics that accepts, and tries to explain, contingency.
38 From Algeria to the École Normale