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Project

Functionaries of Humanity: Husserlian Phenomenology, the UNESCO, and the problem of universalism in science and culture

The UNESCO’s constitution was signed 75 years ago. Its ambitious original mandate was to “build peace in the minds of men and women” by supporting cooperation in education, science, and culture. 10 years earlier, in 1935, Edmund Husserl had, in public lectures in Vienna and Prague, warned against narrow, positivistic understandings of science and culture, leading to value relativism, biological racism, and nationalism, and urged Europe to dare a radical ‘renewal.’ In this spirit, Flemish philosopher H. L. Van Breda submitted to the UNESCO an application dossier in 1949, with letters by 40 leading intellectuals, presenting Husserl’s philosophical legacy as a contribution to the renewal of a universal world culture after the atrocities of WWII. The dossier’s success permitted the posthumous publication of Husserl´s major work, The Crisis, and put phenomenology at the center of post-war intellectual life. His idea of philosophers as “functionaries of humanity” became a cultural program led by the regulative idea of global federal governance based on universal rational principles. This project will, for the first time, present and critically assess the dossier in specific reference to the cultural relativism/universalism controversy within UNESCO and within phenomenology, and critically consider the potential of a Husserlian approach for formulating viable responses to the current crisis of UNESCO, evolving around science and education in national and global culture(s).

Date:1 Jan 2021 →  Today
Keywords:UNESCO, Husserlian Phenomenology
Disciplines:Philosophy of culture, Continental philosophy, Phenomenology, History of philosophy