Historicity and Rationality in Husserl's Later Thought

In this article, the author treats of some of the main concepts in Husserl's late thought as a means to reconstructing Husserl's specific conception of historicity and rationality. Historicity, phenomenologically conceived, presents the logical genesis of a shared cultural world from the constitutive activities of the subject: that is, as the genesis of inter-subjectively valid forms of sense, which undergo sedimentation and then ground further; and yet further, phases of this whole constitutive process. In this way, there emerges the shared, concrete world, as a special cultural form, although making claim to universal validity. The author goes on to present Husserl's idea of rationality, which is built on this concept of historicity, and he follows it up to the ideal of Europe, as a special philosopho-theoretical project, which in Husserl's view raises human historicity and rationality to a new, specifically teleological, level.