Husserl: Philosophy of Logic

Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl are two seemingly different philosophers in their methodology. Both have significantly influenced Western philosophy in that their contributions established fields within philosophy that are of intensive study today. Still, their differences in methodology have, in certain instances, yielded similar or distinct results. Their results ranged from the distinction of sense and reference, objectivity, and the theory of mathematics: specifically, their definition of number. Frege and Husserl have such striking similarities in their theory of sense and (...) reference and related notions that from their apparent correspondence, Frege seems to have acknowledged the coincidences in their theories (Frege & Kluge, 1972) (Hill & Rosado Haddock Intro, 4, & 30-33). That is not to say there are exact parallels between Frege and Husserl and their results, as I will acknowledge their similarities and differences within scale. So, I intend to demonstrate their respective theories and results descriptively to show their likenesses while still recognizing their divergences in scope and methodology. Indirectly, I would also hope to illustrate the ties, in terms of subject matter, of these two philosophers who are historically considered at odds with one another; be it personally, in their schools of philosophy, or methodologically (Hartimo 47-53). (shrink)

In this article, I analyze the evolution of Husserl's view on the normativity of logic and the corresponding changes in his phenomenological analysis of judgment. Initially, in the Prolegomena, Husserl claimed that the laws of pure logic are ideal and acquire normative status only as a result of application. Later, however, he revised this position and claimed that the same laws are at once ideal and normative. Sections 1 and 2 present textual evidence for attributing such a change of position (...) to Husserl, which is not generally acknowledged in the literature. Section 3 critically examines Husserl's early position, with specific attention to the model of instantiation. Sections 4–6 identify three key stages in the development of Husserl's theory of judgment that lead to the normative conception of pure logic: (1) the critique of the dissociation of ideal content and assertive force; (2) the rejection of the instantiation model of proposition and the development of a new account in terms of identification; (3) the genetic‐phenomenological interpretation of proposition and the elaboration of the three‐layer structure of pure logic. (shrink)

Theories of meaning developed within the analytic tradition, starting with Gottlob Frege, and within continental philosophy, starting with Husserl, can be distinguished by their disagreement about the phenomenon of collapse or failure of meaning. Our text focuses on Frege’s legacy, taken up by Rudolph Carnap, which culminated in a view of the collapse of meaning defined first by a purely syntactic conception of categorial error and second, when Tarski entered the scene, by the paradoxes created by the conflict between the (...) use of the predicate truth and the concept of proof. As positivism’s conventionalism and late model-theoretic semantics became the paradigms derived from this position, the result, in our view, was a conception of meaning success and meaning failure dominated by dependence on a technological conception. We will argue that this dependence leads to the inability to evaluate the breaks in rational parameters and crises of meaning addressed by the phenomenological and transcendental perspectives. Husserl’s critique of logic as technology is the basis for the reflexive standpoint on the phenomena of meaning failure that leads to a theoretical and eidetic ideal approach to that phenomenon. It is then suggested that this phenomenological reflective standpoint on the problem of meaning failure is the origin of the doors that lead to the divergent paths between the analytic and continental traditions. Thus, this is an article with three argumentative phases connected into a larger unity. The first phase presents Husserl’s critique of a purely extensional, syntactic, and recursive conception of logical consequence and the concept of truth; the second presents Hussel’s larger conception of meaning-failure; the third—presented in an appendix— presents a lesson on the division between continental and analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This essay examines how Husserl stretches the bounds of his philosophy of meaning, according to which all propositions are categorical, to account for existential propositions, which seem to lack predicates. I examine Husserl’s counterintuitive conclusion that an existential proposition does possess a predicate and I explore his endeavor to pinpoint what that predicate is. This goal is accomplished in three stages. First, I examine Husserl’s standard theory of predication and categorial intuition from his 1901 Logical Investigations. Second, I show how (...) Husserl imposes those 1901 insights to uncover the predicate of the existential proposition in unpublished manuscripts and lectures. He determines that the existential proposition predicates of the subject, that it corresponds to an actual object. This analysis reveals that Husserl’s descriptions of existential propositions from the late 1890s employed both static and genetic methodologies. In those texts, he carefully untangles and clarifies the co-enmeshed passive and active moments of consciousness and shows that the passive givenness of certain circumstances is the condition of possibility for our active verifying of propositions. Finally, I execute a critical assessment of Husserl’s thought to reveal that, while his insights about existential propositions are largely correct, they are augmented by re-construing them within the context of his mature philosophy. Only by renouncing his metaphysical neutrality and by accounting for intersubjectivity, can Husserl properly clarify existential propositions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to clarify Husserl’s critical remarks about Kant’s view of logic by comparing their respective views of logic. In his Formal and Transcendental Logic Husserl criticizes Kant for not asking transcendental questions about formal logic, but rather ascribing an ‘extraordinary apriority’ to it. He thinks the reason for Kant’s uncritical attitude to logic lies in Kant’s view of logic as directed toward the subjective, instead of being concerned with a ‘“world” of ideal Objects’. Whereas for Kant, general (...) logic is about laws of reasoning. Husserl thinks that formal logic should describe formal structures. Husserl claims that if Kant had had a more comprehensive concept of logic, he would have thought of raising critical questions about how logic is possible. This kind of criticism cannot itself use forms of judgments or syllogisms of logic, nor even the ‘inferential’ [schliessende] method more generally, but should be descriptive in nature. Husserl's transcendental phenomenology is the method for such criticism. The paper argues that this results in reflection, and possibly revision, of the logical principles with respect to the normative goals governing the investigation in question. (shrink)

Dieses Buch befasst sich mit dem von Edmund Husserl in seinen Prolegomena zur reinen Logik unternommenen Versuch einer Beschreibung und Fundierung der reinen Logik und seiner Vereinbarkeit mit dem in der VI. Logischen Untersuchung behandelten Konzept der kategorialen Anschauung. Insbesondere geht es dabei um die Frage, ob die kategoriale Anschauung unter die in den Prolegomena vorgestellte Definition des spezifischen Relativismus subsumiert werden kann. Die Relevanz der Frage besteht darin, dass, wenn sie sich positiv beantworten ließe, eine Abweichung vom Antipsychologismus der (...) Prolegomena vorliegen würde. Der Autor argumentiert für die Vereinbarkeit des erwähnten theoretischen Konzepts mit dem Inhalt der Prolegomena. (shrink)

This paper examines the evolution of Edmund Husserl’s theory of perceptual occlusion. This task is accomplished in two stages. First, I elucidate Husserl’s conclusion, from his 1901 Logical Investigations, that the occluded parts of perceptual objects are intended by partial signitive acts. I focus on two doctrines of that account. I examine Husserl’s insight that signitive intentions are composed of Gehalt and I discuss his conclusion that signitive intentions sit on the continuum of fullness. Second, the paper discloses how Husserl (...) transforms his 1901 philosophy in his 1913 revisions to the Sixth Logical Investigation, affirming that the occluded parts of perceptual objects are intended by empty contiguity acts. I demonstrate how he overturns the two core doctrines of his theory from the Investigations in these revisions, claiming that empty intentions are not composed of Gehalt and asserting that those acts break with the continuum of fullness. Husserl implements these changes to solve problems that arise from his recognition of two new kinds of intentions; darker and completely dark acts. Finally, in the conclusion, I cash out this analysis, by indicating that, in 1913, Husserl transforms his theory of fulfillment on the basis of his new insights about empty acts. (shrink)

The phenomenological movement begins in the Prolegomena to Husserl’s Logical Investigations as a philosophy of logic. Despite this, remarkably little attention has been paid to Husserl’s arguments in the Prolegomena in the contemporary philosophy of logic. In particular, the literature spawned by Gilbert Harman’s work on the normative status of logic is almost silent on Husserl’s contribution to this topic. I begin by raising a worry for Husserl’s conception of ‘pure logic’ similar to Harman’s challenge to explain the connection between (...) logic and reasoning. If logic is the study of the forms of all possible theories, it will include the study of many logical consequence relations; by what criteria, then, should we select one consequence relation as correct? I consider how Husserl might respond to this worry by looking to his late account of the ‘genealogy of logic’ in connection with Gurwitsch’s claim that ‘[i]t is to prepredicative perceptual experience … that one must return for a radical clarification and for the definitive justification of logic’. Drawing also on Sartre and Heidegger, I consider how prepredicative experience might constrain or guide our selection of a logical consequence relation and our understanding of connectives like implication and negation. (shrink)

Husserl and Frege reject logical psychologism, the view that logical laws are psychological 'laws of thought'. This paper offers an account of these famous objections and argues that their crucial premise, the necessity of logical laws, is justified with reference to a problematic metaphysics. However, this premise can be established in a more plausible way, namely via a transcendental argument which starts from the practice of rational criticism. This argument is developed through a discussion of Quine's holism, which at first (...) appears to make the idea of the necessity of logical laws even less plausible, but eventually turns out to speak in favor of this view. (shrink)

As a multi-layered theory of the foundations of “‘mathematicizing’ logic”, Husserlian pure logic is stratified on three levels (sub-theoretical, theoretical, meta-theoretical), which are then themselves transversally split in two sides (apophantic and ontological). This paper investigates how symbolic knowledge works in this framework—viz. in terms of ‘How can the subjective operating with symbols be justified in the process of obtaining objective contents of knowledge?’ To do so, it innovates in showing how Husserl’s theory of semiotic intentionality provides the epistemological-transcendental foundation (...) for the syntactic-semantic correspondence of the meaning relationship that is operative at the kernel of pure logic—i.e. on the theoretical level, between systems of axioms and formal manifolds. And thereby, it bridges the gap between the two volumes of the first edition of the Logical Investigations (namely, the Prolegomena and the six Investigations). (shrink)

It is often supposed one can draw a distinction, among the assumptions on which an inference rests, between certain background assumptions and certain more salient, or foregrounded, assumptions. Yet what may such a fore-v-background structure, or such structures, consist it? In particular, how do they relate to consciousness? According to a ‘Boring View’, such structures can be captured by specifying, for the various assumptions of the inference, whether they are phenomenally conscious, or access conscious, or else how easily available they (...) are to such consciousness. According to an ‘Interesting View’, there are fore-v-background structures over and above such classifications. The chapter gestures at reasons for thinking that an Interesting View at least merits exploration. The paper discusses some recent contributions to such a view in analytical philosophy; some remarks in Husserl on what he dubbed the horizonal dimension of acts of consciousness; and psychological work on the role of gist or schema representations in perception and memory. It is proposed that background assumptions can figure in consciousness by being as it were condensed into a consciously, though inattentively, entertained notion of their overall thematic gist, where this thematic gist gives the drift of a possible elucidation of how or why such-and-such salient grounds mean that so-and-so conclusion holds. (shrink)

André de Muralt has carried out a rigorous comparative analysis of phenomenological logic and scholastic logic of Thomist origin in order to elucidate whether Husserlian intentionality could be related to Thomist intentionality. This comparative analysis has brought to light that the Husserlian conception of logic responds to a dialectic structure which commits it to critical and metaphysical premises completely opposed to those of Thomist realism.

This paper deals with Husserl’s idea of pure logic as it is coined in the Logical Investigations. First, it exposes the formation of pure logic around a conception of completeness ; then, it presents intentionality as the keystone of such a structuring ; and finally, it provides a systematic reconstruction of pure logic from the semiotic standpoint of intentionality. In this way, it establishes Husserlian pure logic as a phenomenological epistemology of mathematical logic.

Lecture notes from Husserl's logic lectures published during the last 20 years offer a much better insight into his doctrine of the forms of meaning than does the fourth Logical Investigation or any other work published during Husserl's lifetime. This paper provides a detailed reconstruction, based on all the sources now available, of Husserl's system of logical grammar. After having explained the notion of meaning that Husserl assumes in his later logic lectures as well as the notion of form of (...) meaning as it features in ‘doctrine of the forms of meaning’, I present a system of rules that describes all the various forms of meaning that Husserl singles out in his lectures. (shrink)

The paper addresses three main issues drawing on Husserl’s writings on logic. First, what gives the logical objects their objective status, given the fact that these are intimately connected with human mental processes? Second, if logical objects are objective then how is logical knowledge at all possible? The answer to this question leads to a transcendental foundation of formal logic. Third, how do the principles of logic apply to the real world? This question can be addressed by positing a formal (...) ontology. Against Russell and Whitehead, it has been pointed out that even if logical implication does not in any way depend on human mind, inference is definitely mind-dependent. But this thesis does not necessarily lead to psychologism, as has been pointed out by contemporary Indian logicians. Indian theories of inference deal with the question of truth and falsity but lack a formal ontology. Both pure logic and modern physics claim to be independent of human existence. This claim becomes evident in the conversation between Heisenberg and Tagore. Husserl had distinguished between logical grammar and logic of consequences. The notions of truth and falsity are relevant only in the context of logic of consequences. However, none of the well-known theories of truth, correspondence, coherence or pragmatic theory is free from defects. Following in the footprints of the Advaita Vedantins, it has been maintained that falsity is more fundamental than truth. In the process of cognitive history, a proposition is taken to be true, unless its falsity is proven. Hence the conclusion: since Philosophy is search for the truth, all Philosophy—infinitely—is a gradual rejection of all claims to truth and finally, destroys itself. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates that Edmund Husserl’s frequently overlooked 1890 manuscript, “On the Logic of Signs,” when closely investigated, reveals itself to be the hermeneutical touchstone for his seminal 1891 Philosophy of Arithmetic. As the former comprises Husserl’s earliest attempt to account for all of the different kinds of signitive experience, his conclusions there can be directly applied to the latter, which is focused on one particular type of sign; namely, number signs. Husserl’s 1890 descriptions of motivating and replacing signs will (...) be respectively employed to clarify his 1891 understanding of the authentic and inauthentic presentations of numbers via number signs. Moreover, his schematic classification of replacement-signs in Semiotic will illuminate the reasons why he believed the number system to be necessary for the operation of replacing number signs. (shrink)

In recent work, Amie Thomasson has sought to develop a new approach to the philosophy of the categories which is metaphysically neutral between traditional realist and conceptualist approaches, and which has its roots in the ‘correlationalist’ approach to categories put forward in Husserl’s writings in the 1900s–1910s and systematically charted over the past few decades by David Woodruff Smith in his studies of Husserl’s philosophy. Here the author aims to provide a recontextualization and critical assessment of correlationalism in a Husserlian (...) vein. To this end, the author presents, first, the reasons why, later in his life, Husserl himself found his earlier treatment of categories philosophically naive, and why he increasingly advocated for a more genetic-teleological account. The author then draws upon arguments made a century earlier by Schelling and Hegel, in criticism of Fichte, to point up what might remain philosophically unsatisfying about even the post-correlationalist genetic position of the later Husserl, in light of the pronounced trend in Husserl’s own development, on the questions of reason and spirit, toward absolute idealism. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to provide a unitary typology for the incompatibilities of meanings at stake on different levels of Husserlian pure logic—namely, between systems of axioms and pure morphology of meanings; I show that they perfectly match by converging on the notion of Widersinn.

L’objet de cet article est de dégager, sur l’exemple de la prédication, ce qu’est le propre d’une logique phénoménologique. On montre qu’elle se caractérise par plusieurs démarches essentielles : régression du domaine de la signification idéale vers les modes de visée, de comportement et d’évidence subjectifs propres à l’étant qui, par son discours, vise les formes syntaxiques, donc depuis les articulations syntaxiques de la signification vers celles de la pensée ; et surtout, un déplacement de l’orientation thématique depuis le domaine (...) de la signification idéale vers un champ infralinguistique et pré-idéal où ce dernier a sa source, afin de rechercher l’origine ultime du logos dans des structures prélogiques (formes noétiques de l’expérience perceptive, structures ontologiques de l’étant percu, modalités de la compréhension ontologique. Ne se limitant pas à la pensée logique au sens strict, on opère un élargissement considérable de la notion de logique, pour restituer les échafaudages qui mènent à l’élaboration de la syntaxe et replacer la pensée logifiante dans le mode d’être, de comprendre et de faire-expérience du sujet ou du Dasein. (shrink)

In his fifth Logical Investigation, Husserl intensely scrutinizes three possible significations of the concept of consciousness. In these analyses, he also strives to clearly delineate between two types of consciousness: psychological and phenomenological. The goal of this paper is to show that the way in which the (psychical) act is conceived and defined, according to the Husserlian approach, as a lived, intentional experience plays an essential role in clarifying the distinction between the empirical-psychological level of consciousness (where the act as (...) a lived experience manifests itself) and its eidetic or ideal level (wherein any type of objectivity is constituted as such). Moreover, I shall try to argue that the notion of act conceived in this manner had influenced and decisively determined the development of the entire Husserlian phenomenology and theory of knowledge exactly because it explains how knowledge in general is constituted from an objective point of view. Another highly relevant distinction that needs to be dealt with in this context is the difference that Husserl establishes between the descriptive and intentional contents of the act. I shall try to show that this distinction presupposes in fact a previous conceptual determination of the noema (undertaken jointly with the analysis of the noetical components of consciousness at this level), and that the way in which the relationship between these two strands of consciousness is described determines further and in a fundamental manner the development of the idea of intentionality itself. (shrink)

Au terme des Prolégomènes, Husserl formule son idée de la logique pure en la structurant sur deux niveaux: l'un, supérieur, de la logique formelle fondé transcendantalement et d'un point de vue épistémologique par l'autre, inférieur, d'une morphologie des catégories. Seul le second de ces deux niveaux est traité dans les Recherches logiques, tandis que les travaux théoriques en logique formelle menés par Husserl à la même époque en paraissent plutôt indépendants. Cet article est consacré à ces travaux tels que recueillis (...) dans les appendices VI-X du volume 12 des Husserliana. Mettant en évidence la théorie de la signification qui les sous-tend par le biais d'une analyse de la question dite de l'extension des systèmes d'axiomes et de sa résolution au moyen d'une notion de complétude, son objectif est d'expliciter les modalités de l'intégration de la logique formelle dans l'idée husserlienne de la logique pure au tournant du xx siècle.When formulating his idea of pure logic in the Prole.. (shrink)

This paper analyzes and compares the attempts at solving the paradox of non-existence put forward by Alexius Meinong and Edmund Husserl. It will be argued that Meinong’s solution is not convincing since he retreats from the field of predicate logic, in which the paradox arises, to a version of propositional logic. On the other hand, Husserl´s approach is more promising since he moves forward to an extension of predicate logic, in which judgments may be evaluated in relation to different contexts (...) or, in Husserl´s terminology, “spheres”. More precisely, to Husserl, existential judgments have to be interpreted as a kind of cross-sphere judgments, and thus existence fulfills a function loosely analogous to that of modal operators in possible-worlds semantics. (shrink)

For different reasons, Husserl's original, thought-provoking ideas on the philosophy of logic and mathematics have been ignored, misunderstood, even despised, by analytic philosophers and phenomenologists alike, who have been content to barricade themselves behind walls of ideological prejudices. Yet, for several decades, Husserl was almost continuously in close professional and personal contact with those who created, reshaped and revolutionized 20th century philosophy of mathematics, logic, science and language in both the analytic and phenomenological schools, people whom those other makers of (...) 20th century philosophy, Russell, Frege, Wittgenstein and their followers, rarely, if ever, met. Independently of them, Husserl offered alternatives to the well-trodden paths of logicism, nominalism, formalism and intuitionism. He presented a well-articulated, thoroughly argued case for logic as an objective science, but was not philosophically naive to the point of not seeing the role of subjectivity in shaping the sense of the reality facing objective science. Given the preeminent role that philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics have played in transforming the way philosophy has been done since Husserl's time, and given the depth of his insights and his obvious expertise in those fields, his ideas need to be integrated into present-day, mainstream philosophy. Here, philosopher Claire Ortiz Hill and mathematician-philosopher Jairo da Silva offer a wealth of interesting insights intended to subvert the many mistaken idees recues about the development of Husserl's thought and reestablish broken ties between it and philosophy now. (shrink)

In his 1896 lecture course on logic–reportedly a blueprint for the Prolegomena to Pure Logic –Husserl develops an explicit account of logic as an independent and purely theoretical discipline. According to Husserl, such a theory is needed for the foundations of logic (in a more general sense) to avoid psychologism in logic. The present paper shows that Husserl’s conception of logic (in a strict sense) belongs to the algebra of logic tradition. Husserl’s conception is modeled after arithmetic, and respectively logical (...) inferences are viewed as analogical to arithmetical calculation. The paper ends with an examination of Husserl’s involvement with the key characters of the algebra of logic tradition. It is concluded that Ernst Schröder, but presumably also Hermann and Robert Grassmann influenced Husserl most in his turn away from psychologism. (shrink)

This article is composed of three sections that investigate the epistemological foundations of Husserl’s idea of logic from the Logical Investigations . First, it shows the general structure of this logic. Husserl conceives of logic as a comprehensive, multi-layered theory of possible theories that has its most fundamental level in a doctrine of meaning. This doctrine aims to determine the elementary categories that constitute every possible meaning (meaning-categories). The second section presents the main idea of Husserl’s search for an epistemological (...) foundation for knowledge, science and logic. Their epistemological clarification can only be reached through a detailed analysis of the structure of those intentions that give us what is meant in our intentions. To reveal the intuitive giveness of logical forms is the ultimate aim of Husserl’s epistemology of logic. Logical forms and meaning-categories can only be given in a certain higher-order intuition that Husserl calls categorical intuition. The third section of this article distinguishes different kinds of categorical intuition and shows how the most basic logical categories and concepts are given to us in a categorical abstraction. (shrink)

The article introduces and discusses an unpublished manuscript by Edmund Husserl, conserved at the Husserl-Archives Leuven with signature K I 26, pp. 73a–73b. The article is followed by the text of the manuscript in German and in an English translation. The manuscript, titled “The Transition through the Impossible” ( Der Durchgang durch das Unmögliche ), was part of the material Husserl used for his 1901 Doppelvortrag in Göttingen. In the manuscript, the impossible is characterized as the “sphere of objectlessness” ( (...) Sphäre der Gegenstandslosigkeit ) and Husserl addresses the question whether and when it is warranted to perform a transition through the impossible to obtain valid results for the sphere of objectivity. (shrink)

This explorative article is organized around a set of questions concerning the concept of a function. First, a summary of certain general facts about functions that are a common coin in contemporary logic is given. Then Frege's attempt at clarifying the nature of functions in his famous paper Function and Concept and in his Grundgesetze is discussed along with some questions which Freges' approach gave rise to in the literature. Finally, some characteristic uses of functional notions to be found in (...) the work of Bernard Bolzano and in Edmund Husserl's early work are presented and elucidated. (shrink)

It is beginning to be rather well known that Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenological philosophy, was originally a mathematician; he studied with Weierstrass and Kronecker in Berlin, wrote his doctoral dissertation on the calculus of variations, and was then a colleague of Cantor in Halle until he moved to the Göttingen of Hilbert and Klein in 1901. Much of Husserl’s writing prior to 1901 was about mathematics, and arguably the origin of phenomenology was in Husserl’s attempts to give philosophical (...) foundations first for analysis and later for the formal sciences in general. However, what exactly Husserl’s thoughts about mathematics were is relatively little known. Stefania Centrone’s book Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics in the Early Husserl fills this lacuna. Centrone deciphers Husserl’s early texts about mathematics and logic somewhat selectively, but also extremely accurately and carefully into lucid English and in terms we know, without however reading contemporary views into Husserl’s views. Her analysis reveals for example that Husserl’s view of logic is close to what is today taught in the standard textbooks and that he viewed abstract mathematics as a theory of structures. Her work also uncovers Husserl’s relationship to the algebraists of logic as well as to Bolzano, Frege, and Hilbert.The book is composed of three rather independent chapters. In contrast to most of the other commentaries on early Husserl, the organization of the book is thematic rather than an attempt to document the various stages in the development of Husserl’s views. The first chapter discusses Husserl’s major work on arithmetic, the second the idea of pure logic, and the last the imaginary in mathematics. (shrink)

L’ambition de cet article est de reformuler l’ontologie des propositions proposée par Husserl dans ses Prolegomena zur reinen Logik (1900). Dans cet ouvrage, Husserl affirme que les propositions, auxquelles a trait ce qu’il appelle la “logique pure”, sont des propriétés (des “species”) d’actes, mettons d’actes de jugement. En outre, il considère les propriétés comme circonscrivant toutes leurs instantiations possibles. Sur cette base, on comprend mieux en quel sens la réflexion de Husserl sur la nature de la logique dépend de son (...) ontologie des propositions. Dans cet article, les deux points suivants sont discutés dans cette perspective. D’abord, la structure de son argument négatif contre le psychologisme n’est dans son ensemble correctement comprise que si l’on prend en considération l’ontologie husserlienne des propositions. Cela explique pourquoi la conception de la logique comme une science normative a priori ne satisfait pas Husserl lorsqu’il vise à réfuter le psychologisme. Ensuite, sa conception positive des lois logiques serait aussi rendue plus intelligible par cette théorie. Celle-ci fournit tout ce qui est nécessaire pour réfuter le psychologisme sans renoncer pour autant à une conception globalement aristotélicienne de la logique, que Husserl tient pour indispensable mais qu’il serait particulèrement difficile de maintenir dans le cadre de la conception normative a priori. (shrink)

Quel est le chemin qui, chez Husserl, nous mène de la logique formelle à celle transcendantale? S’agit-il de la voie kantienne qui va de la “logique générale” à celle “transcendantale” ou le caractère mathématique de la logique moderne interdit que celle-ci puisse jouer le rôle de “fil conducteur transcendantal”? Dans cet article, à la lumière de ce que l’on pourrait appeler la réciprocité entre passivité et logique, on avance la thèse selon laquelle c’est justement la logique mathématique qui pour Husserl (...) peut jouer un tel rôle. Chez Husserl, il y a en effet aussi bien une logique de la passivité qu’une passivité de la logique : non seulement ce qui est passif est synthétique et, en tant que tel, formellement déterminé, mais la logique, en tant que corpus de connaissances, est à son tour saturée par une passivité qui en assure le sens et la validité en tant que logique. C’est au point de croisement entre les deux, où l’une gouverne la force constitutive de l’autre et vice-versa, que l’on peut trouver le fil conducteur d’une enquête sur la possibilité d’une logique transcendantale à partir d’une réflexion sur la logique mathématique formelle. (shrink)

French translation of "Truth-Makers" (1984). A realist theory of truth for a class of sentence holds that there are entities in virtue of which these sentences are true or false. We call such entities ‘truthmakers’ and contend that those for a wide range of sentences about the real world are moments (dependent particulars). Since moments are unfamiliar we provide a definition and a brief philosophical history, anchoring them in our ontology by showing that they are objects of perception. The core (...) of our theory is the account of truthmaking for atomic sentences, in which we expose a pervasive ‘dogma of logical form’, which says that atomic sentences cannot have more than one truthmaker. The authors uphold the mutual independence of logical and ontological complexity. The theory is compared with that of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and the authors outline formal principles of truthmaking taking account of both kinds of complexity and suggesting how to overcome Wittgenstein’s problem of negation. (shrink)

Résumé — Dans cet article, je postule qu’il y a plusieurs variétés d’antipsychologisme logique, auxquelles correspondent différents concepts de « logique pure ». Deux conceptions sont ici confrontées : la « logique de l’idéalité » de Husserl et la « logique de la validité » de Rickert. Contrairement à l’emploi équivoque des termes « validité » et « idéalité » chez Heidegger, je montre d’abord que ces deux conceptions, bien que très proches, ne sont pas parfaitement superposables, car Rickert partage (...) l’antipsychologisme de Husserl mais rejette sa théorie des significations. Il apparaît ensuite que cette divergence – particulièrement visible dans la recension inédite, par Rickert, du livre très controversé de Palágyi – touche en réalité un « point faible » des Recherches logiques de Husserl : la confusion entre les objets logiques et les idéalités mathématiques. L’alternative « axiologique » proposée par Rickert évite d’emblée cette confusion en soutenant que le sens logique des propositions, fondé sur de pures « valeurs théoriques », est irréductible à un objet idéal.— In this article, I postulate that there are several varieties of logical antipsychologism, to which correspond various concepts of “pure logic”. Two conceptions are here under discussion : Husserl’s “logic of ideality” and Rickert’s “logic of validity”. Against the equivocal use of “validity” and “ideality” by Heidegger, I first show that none of those conceptions can be exactly superimposed on the other one, because Rickert agrees with Husserl’s antipsychologism but rejects his theory of significations. It then appears that this difference – which is particularly obvious in Rickert’s unpublished review of Palágyi’s very controversial book –, reveals in fact a “weak point” in Husserl’s Logical Investigations : the confusion between logical and mathematical objects . Rickert’s “axiological” alternative avoids directly this confusion by asserting the irreducibility of the propositional sense – which is grounded on pure “theoretical values” – to an ideal object. (shrink)

Quine’s criticism of the notion of analyticity applies, at best, to Carnap’s notion, not to those of Frege or Husserl. The failure of logicism is also the failure of Frege’s definition of analyticity, but it does not even touch Husserl’s views, which are based on logical form. However, some relatively concrete number-theoretic statements do not admit such a formalization salva veritate. A new definition of analyticity based not on syntactical but on semantical logical form is proposed and argued for.

According to Edmund Husserl in the Prolegomena to Pure Logic, which constitutes the preliminary rational foundation for – and also the entire first volume of – his Logical Investigations, pure logic is the a priori theoretical, nomological science of „demonstration“.1 For him, demonstration includes both consequence and provability. Consequence is the defining property of all and only formally valid arguments, i. e., arguments that cannot lead from true premises to false conclusions. And provability is the property of a logical system (...) such that, for every truth of logic in that system, there is, at least in principle, a rigorous step-by-step logically valid procedure demonstrating its validity according to strictly universal, ideal, and necessary logical laws. In this way, the laws of pure logic completely determine its internal structure. Moreover, these laws and these proofs are all knowable a priori, with selfevident insight. So not only is pure logic independent of any other theoretical science, in that it requires no other science in order to ground its core notion of demonstration, it also provides both epistemic and semantic foundations for every other theoretical science, as well as every practical discipline or „technology. “ To the extent that pure logic is the foundation of every other. (shrink)

Quine’s criticism of the notion of analyticity applies, at best, to Carnap’s notion, not to those of Frege or Husserl. The failure of logicism is also the failure of Frege’s definition of analyticity, but it does not even touch Husserl’s views, which are based on logical form. However, some relatively concrete number-theoretic statements do not admit such a formalization salva veritate. A new definition of analyticity based not on syntactical but on semantical logical form is proposed and argued for.

States of affairs are entities like snow’s being white. This dissertation encompasses two projects. First, I provide a historical survey of the concept of state of affairs as it has been used in the history of ontology. Second, I provide a novel conceptual account of states of affairs.

This paper discusses Jean van Heijenoort’s (1967) and Jaakko and Merrill B. Hintikka’s (1986, 1997) distinction between logic as auniversal language and logic as a calculus, and its applicability to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Although it is argued that Husserl’s phenomenology shares characteristics with both sides, his view of logic is closer to the model-theoretical, logic-as-calculus view. However, Husserl’s philosophy as transcendental philosophy is closer to the universalist view. This paper suggests that Husserl’s position shows that holding a model-theoretical view of (...) logic does not necessarily imply a calculus view about the relations between language and the world. The situation calls for reflection about the distinction: It will be suggested that the applicability of the van Heijenoort and the Hintikkas distinction either has to be restricted to a particular philosopher’s views about logic, in which case no implications about his or her more general philosophical views should be inferred from it; or the distinction turns into a question of whether our human predicament is inescapable or whether it is possible, presumably by means of model theory, to obtain neutral answers to philosophical questions. Thus the distinction ultimately turns into a question about the correct method for doing philosophy. (shrink)

Husserl and the Logic of Experience includes both detailed work on particular aspects of logical theory (such as an inquiry into the status of the principle of excluded middle) and also detailed investigations into the nature of the logic of temporal conceptions. Demonstrating the cultural import of Husserl's work while also showing its continuing significance for logical theory, this collection is a milestone in the study of transcendental phenomenology.

The centerpiece of the Analyses is a translation from the German of notes for a series of lectures given by phenomenologist Edmund Husserl in the early twenties, which is to say some eighty years ago. Husserl designated the topic of the lectures 'transcendental logic'. In this context, the term, 'transcendental', is not to be understood in some mystical sense, but rather in a Kantian sense: pertaining to the conditions of possibility of experience. Likewise, the term, 'logic', is not to be (...) taken in the narrow sense of formal logic, but rather in the very general sense it had for Platonic dialectic: a concern with normative guidelines and critical assessment of the possibility of truth. The topic of the lectures is succinctly characterized by Husserl as 'a universal theory of science, and at the same time, a theory of science in principle,' where the latter means 'the science of the a priori of all sciences as such' (p. 1). (shrink)