This essay is concerned with the processes of idealization as described by Husserl in his last work, "The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology". Central as the processes of idealization are to Husserl's reflections on the origin of natural scientific knowledge and his attempt to reground that knowledge in the "forgotten meaning-fundament of natural science," they have not always been well understood. One reason for this is the lack of concrete historical examples. The main purpose of this paper is (...) to correct this deficit. The paper is comprised of four sections. The first distinguishes two separate processes of idealization, one ascending from the life-world and the other descending and applying to it. The interaction of the two is then considered. The second section takes up Husserl's own discussion of Galileo's employment of idealization in his original mathematization of nature. The third section examines Galileo's analysis of freefall as a historical example of the processes of idealization. Here it is seen that the evidence clearly justifies Husserl's claims regarding the role of idealization in the origins of modern natural science. The conclusion employs the insights gained in the previous sections to exhibit the importance of understanding the processes of idealization as propaedeutic to the appreciation of the role and importance of the phenomenological methods of epoché and reduction to restoring lost layers of meaning by nullifying the idealizations which cover the life world. (shrink)

While phenomenologists have contributed to an understanding of the empirical origin and historical development of meaning and thought, they have, until recently, paid relatively little attention to significant problems surrounding meaning transmission, that is to say, problems in the process of education. Notably absent in phenomenological investigations has been the development of a fully thought-out phenomenology of education.’ While this task remains to be completed, it has certainly been well, if unexpectedly, begun. Surprisingly, many of the themes developed in Dewey’s (...) Experience and Nature parallel those of Husserl in The Crisis of European Sciences. These themes, spelled out below, appear as well in Dewey’s Democracy and Education. It is not our intention to rediscover Dewey as a closet phenomenologist. Instead, we hope to show how Dewey’s writings lend themselves to phenomenological understanding and reinterpretation....Our approach will be to compare Dewey and Husserl with regard to a number of shared themes that play a prominent role in their respective philosophies. Themes to be compared include: (1) the “life-world” or what Dewey calls everyday or existential experience: (2) the meaning “horizon”; (3) the origin of thought (or reflection) in everyday experience. One observation that will emerge in the course of our comparison is that Dewey frequently tends to go beyond Husserl in his departure from several key tenets currently popular in Anglo-American philosophy. (shrink)

In this book, the authors first provide an introduction to Dewey's educational theories that is founded on a broad and comprehensive reading of his philosophy as a whole.