Historically, philosophy has been the point of origin of the various sciences. However, once developed, the sciences have increasingly become autonomous, although often taking some paradigm from leading philosophies of the era. As a result, in recent times the relationship of philosophy to the sciences has been more by way of dialogue and critique than a matter of spawning new sciences. This volume of the Selected Studies brings together a series of essays which develop that dialogue and critique with special reference to the insights of phenomenological philosophy.

Natural science, familiarly called “science,” has a pervading presence and influence in our culture because it, more than any other form of knowledge, seems effectively to lay claim to the rigor, objectivity, permanence and universality that the Greeks sought as their emancipatory goal and the search for which, Husserl claims, is the special teleology of the Western community. Natural science, then, developed within the total cultural and philosophical perspective of the West, which gave it impetus and which in turn derived sustenance from its achievements. As an element of our total culture, I shall call this “historical science.” The critique of historical science, then, is a critique of a total cultural milieu.

The mind-body relation or, more particularly, the mind-brain relation 1 has been a perennial puzzle for philosophers—how can things so different be intimately related? Husserl dealt with the mind-brain relation in Section 63 of Ideen II, “Psychophysischer Parallelismus and Wechselwirkung,” 2 where he gave a critique of psychophysical parallelism. For Husserl, the mind-brain relation is to be understood not as a material or metaphysical relation, but as a relation between the presented sense or significance of two varieties of appearances. Husserl’s account in this section will be examined and the following points will be discussed: (1) Husserl’s argument that the significance of brain states is basic to the full sense of a mind operating in an objective world; (2) Husserl’s view that a strict parallelism between the psyche and brain is an eidetic impossibility; (3) Husserl’s treatment of these questions, in so far as he raises but does not adequately resolve the issue, whether states of consciousness precede or follow brain states; (4) Husserl’s somewhat Cartesian failure to distinguish the phenomenological priority of consciousness from the metaphysical question of the possibility of an existent mind apart from a body.