My PhD project concerns the concept of ‘naturalism’ and its meaning in the philosophical projects of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Both of these thinkers had their own reasons to be critical of naturalism and consider it an adversarial position to their philosophical projects. Despite this critical attitude at the roots of phenomenology, however, a lot of effort in contemporary phenomenology scholarship goes into investigating the possibility of naturalizing phenomenology. In order to understand naturalism, its critics, and the project of naturalizing phenomenology, there are at least two other notions we need to understand, namely: science and nature.
In my project, I deal with questions like: Why were two of phenomenology’s founding fathers critical of naturalism? What does this critical attitude mean for the prospect of naturalizing phenomenology? What is the operative idea of nature in a naturalized phenomenology? Does naturalizing phenomenology bring with it the need to phenomenologize nature? Is phenomenology a science, and if yes, what does that mean? If not: should it strive to become more scientific, or is it something fundamentally different from science? How do the answers to these questions influence the possibility of phenomenology to collaborate with the positive sciences?