At the Intersection of Science and Phenomenology

Reflections on Mihály Vajda’s First Productive Period

Abstract

Mihály Vajda returned from time to time to the sensitive problem of the „abstract truth” of academic scholarship and the „prosaic experience of reality” of the socalled lifeworld in his oeuvre spanning more than half a century. In his first productive period, Vajda focused on the question of evidence and the truth criteria of analytic versus synthetic judgments. There are no eternal and unquestionable evidences, scientific truths, because science itself is part of changing social practice, and natural sciences, although they describe or attempt to systematize nature independent of man, always represent nature given to man of a given epoch. Philosophy cannot give up its original mission of universal understanding of the world, which is also
closely linked to social practice, and therefore cannot accept to be forced into the role of being merely „one science among others”. The last third of the paper analyses the chapter on the relationship between science and philosophy in the work of Erik Grigoryevich Yudin, who died tragically young, entitled Systems Theory and Activity, published in the 1970s. Yudin also argues for the autonomy of philosophical knowledge, and stresses that philosophy never loses its relationship with forms of knowledge that are essentially ideological and religiously rooted, such as folkloristic and other naïve constructions of reality.