Philosophy as a Rigorous Science

Ten years after writing the Logical Investigations, Edmund Husserl, in his famous and sole Logos essay, 1 defended the thesis that philosophy ought to be a ‘rigorous science’ and described this goal of philosophy as an “ideal” that ‘has never been completely abandoned,’ but also as an ideal that has never been even roughly or partially realized. Husserl considers it as evidently tragic that up until now philosophy has never lived up to this claim. In this regard, Husserl asserts it is not only philosophy, which is not, yet a perfect or complete science. He rightly emphasizes this is also true for all the so-called exacts sciences, since they are also imperfect and incomplete. Rather, he wants to claim that philosophy has never even begun to be a science such that it would follow no dogmatic system in which ‘all things and each thing in particular are controversial’, and is nothing more than the product of mere individual prejudices and perspectives.3 Now Husserl claims that philosophy, for the very first time, ought to fulfill this ideal and become a rigorous science.