Abstract

I develop and comment on the controversy between Schlick, Husserl and his follower Weyl, concerning the ideal of a scientific philosophy. The main part of the article is divided into two sections. In the first one, I comment on the main texts of the controversy. Starting with Schlick’s attacks (in General Theory of Knowledge) toward the phenomenological method and Husserl’s response, I explain how Weyl progressively entered in the controversy in favor of Husserl. At the end of this section, I show that the debate between the two opposite conceptions of a scientific philosophy was blurred by very different conceptions of the notions of intuition and lived experience (Erlebnisse), which were then at the center of the debate. In the next section, I reconstruct Weyl’s solution to the problem of elaborating a transcendental-idealistic theory of knowledge that is attentive to the historicity of empirical sciences. I show that Weyl seems to consider the history of science as the locus of purification of the expression of a priori. In developing this philosophical position, Weyl provided Husserl with two different kinds of defense against Schlick’s attacks, firstly by showing that synthetic a priori remains an adequate epistemological concept, secondly by showing that certain phenomenological or transcendental philosophies (at least Weyl’s) are capable of taking into account the historicity of science, the importance of which was underestimated by Schlick.