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Phenomenologists such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty are right to point out that, even in so-called ‘primitive’ societies, man never confronts a ‘pure’, non-human ‘nature’. Rather, insofar as nature is present at all, it is present either as the foundation for, or as the correlate of, intentionality. Since, however, all founded intentional structures refer back ultimately to the original founding intentional structures of the life-world, the beginning and end of the phenomenology of nature must be the ‘nature’ revealed in the life-world itself. The final sense of any theoretical or phenomenological inquiry into nature must lie in the dimension of this primordial foundation. What, then, is nature at the level of the life-world?

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-1446-5_19

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