Presence of our Common Past:Husserl’s Return to the Ancient Ideal of Research

Husserlian phenomenology examines its subjects by bringing them to their own presence. It is not immediately obvious how this is done when we are dealing with the past occurrences but actually our past does shape the way we see the world today. Galileo’s inventions in the past guide our understanding of nature at present. In Crisis of European Sciences Husserl explicates this but the actual phenomenological study is done in his working manuscripts from that time. In the manuscripts he does not only study how Galileo’s view is present today, but also shows how this naïve point of view of sciences is to be overcome by returning to more original views. In his manuscript D17 Husserl ends up with one of the perhaps the most controversial views presented by an eminent researcher in the 20th century and opposes Galileo’s views directly. Husserl knew that others would laugh at him and think that he has gone out of his mind, but that did not prevent him from pursuing his investigations. The aim of this study is to search for the sense in Husserl’s manuscript and to explicate how the phenomenological method turns to our common past, that is, history.