Husserl: Logical Investigations

In this paper I discuss the consistency and accuracy of Husserl’s sketch of a theory about non-declarative sentences in the last chapter of Logical Investigations. Whereas the consistency is acknowledged, the accuracy is denied, because Husserl’s treatment of non-declarative phrases such as questions or orders implies that those phrases contain, in some way, a declarative sentence and an objectifying act. To construct a question like »is A B?« as being equivalent to a declarative sentence such as »I ask whether A (...) is B« is, indeed, a false phenomenological analysis, because to ask or to order or to beg is not to assert. I turn, then, to John Austin’s theory of performative utterances and illocutionary acts in order to find a more accurate approach to the logical-semantic content of non-declarative sentences. Eventually, I show how this Husserlian theory of non-declarative sentences has a negative impact on the phenomenological theory of social acts and communication. (shrink)

Before engaging with intentionality, the philosopher of mind must consider the intrinsic nature of psychological elements. Conscious states, contrary to ordinary and scientific objects, seem to penetrate each another in such a way that it becomes impossible to enumerate, class or organize through laws the various experiences at stake. In this context, how is a science of consciousness conceivable? How is it possible to apply the epistemological requirements of any science to a domain whose ontological nature contradicts such demands? The (...) paper reconstructs Husserl’s solution to this issue in the Fifth Logical Investigation. I show how his appeal to the mereological framework of the Third Investigation gives him the tools to rationalize the domain of the mind and to establish phenomenology as an authentic science of consciousness. I first demonstrate that the very task of phenomenological investigations is defined in mereological terms. I then reconstruct the issue regarding the inclusion of the intentional object within the act, by exposing the nuances of the Husserlian position in this famous controversy. In a last part, I show how mereological concepts are at the core of the Husserlian reinterpretation of the Brentanian thesis according to which all acts are presentations or based on presentations. (shrink)

This essay examines the possibility that phenomenological laws might be implemented by a computational mechanism by carefully analyzing key passages from the Prolegomena to Pure Logic. Part I examines the famous Denkmaschine passage as evidence for the view that intuitions of evidence are causally produced by computational means. Part II connects the less famous criticism of Avenarius & Mach on thought-economy with Husserl's 1891 essay 'On the Logic of Signs (Semiotic).' Husserl is shown to reaffirm his earlier opposition to associationist (...) (Humean) and adaptationist (Darwinian) explanations of our thought-machine on the ground that they cannot reconstruct the notion of truth and its syntactic mental preservation in symbolic thought-trains. Part III reveals Husserl's interesting commitment to the idea that descriptive sciences necessarily transform into explanatory sciences on pain of contradicting the essence of science as a rational ideal. Since explanation in relation to phenomenology means causal explanation, and causal explanation in the form of the Denkmaschine accounts for phenomenological intuition, it is inferred that the rationally compelling ideal of explanatory science requires a computationalist reading of the subsequent logical investigations. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of occasional expressions, as discussed by Husserl in his First and Sixth Logical Investigation in relation to the problem of gestures. It aims to show that gestures are intimately related to the use of occasional expressions and have an indispensible contribution to their understanding. In doing so, the paper points out an important lack in Husserl’s early theory of signification, which has to do with its exclusion of all aspects related to intersubjective communication. The paper (...) begins with a short presentation of Husserl’s interpretation of occasional expressions in the Logical Investigations. Further on it identifies the main source of Husserl’s difficulties in coming to terms with this issue in his problematic treatment of communication, and shows how the consideration of gestures can help overcome these difficulties. Finally, the paper considers some consequences which derive from such a treatment of the issue for Husserl’s theory of fulfillment (Bedeutungserfüllung). (shrink)

The publication of the two volumes of the Logical Investigations at the turn of the 20th Century constituted, according to their author, the first breakthrough of an entirely new and original philosophical undertaking, which gave birth to the phenomenological movement. However, before Husserl’s later attempt to systematize the content and provide a unified interpretation of the methods of phenomenology, the strength of this breakthrough rested mainly on the new, though sometimes divergent, paths of investigation that phenomenology was able to open. (...) The purpose of this chapter is to present an overview of the main discoveries that gave rise to this phenomenological breakthrough and to provide a faithful account of its original philosophical claims – an account that resists the temptation of projecting onto the Logical Investigations an a posteriori interpretation based on a later stage of Husserl’s philosophical thought. The chapter will highlight the tensions inherent to Husserl’s phenomenological project, born from an original attempt to combine the resources of Brentano’s psychology with the logical expectations inherited from Bolzano’s philosophy and Frege’s antipsychologism. These tensions clearly appear if we pay attention to Husserl’s failed attempts to edit and rewrite the first edition of the Logical Investigations after he completed the first volume of the Ideas, which provides a transcendental and much more systematic framework for the phenomenological method. The chapter focuses in particular upon the ambiguities of Husserl’s early theory of meaning and points out the transformations of his conception of indexicals (or “essentially occasional expressions”) in order to shed some light on the tensions inherent to the Logical Investigations that the transcendental move towards a form of phenomenological idealism was expected to overcome. (shrink)

La determinación husserliana de la evidencia como cumplimiento [Erfüllung] llevó a una tácita identificación de la evidencia con la conciencia plena. Sin embargo, el desarrollo de su fenomenología revela que en todo caso se presenta como una síntesis particular de plenitud y vacío, configuración que resulta modal por tratarse de una conciencia de posibilidad aunque en un sentido material y no cualitativo. Los Prolegómenos aportan un primer elemento en esta línea –que sólo en la fenomenología genética resulta explícita–: la evidencia (...) como vivencia de la verdad supone que la validez de un enunciado se sustenta en la posibilidad de la existencia de otros enunciados idénticos de la misma forma y materia; con las Investigaciones lógicas, estas multiplicidades posibles serán comprendidas como momentos en un nuevo contexto descriptivo: la mención y el cumplimiento, lo cual otorga estatuto intencional a la objetividad que se configura como escorzo de sentido, esto es, el modo en que la unidad determinada de plenitud y vacío –en cuanto horizonte de cumplimiento posible– conforma la evidencia objetiva.Husserlian determination of evidence as fulfillment [Erfüllung] brought a tacit identification of evidence with full consciousness. However, the development of his phenomenology reveals that it always appears as a particular synthesis of fullness and emptiness, configuration that turns out to be modal because it is a consciousness of possibility though in a material and not qualitative sense. The Prolegomena introduce a first element in this perspective –that only in the genetic phenomenology becomes explicit–: evidence as experience of truth supposes that the validity of a judgment supports itself in the possibility of existence of other identical judgments with the same form and matter; with the Logical Investigations, this possible multiplicities will be understood as moments in a new descriptive context: mention and fulfillment, whereby objectivity –configured as adumbration of sense– acquires intentional status, i. e., the mode in which the determined unity of fullness and emptiness –as horizon of possible fulfillment– shapes objective evidence. (shrink)

This paper accomplishes three goals. First, the essay demonstrates that Edmund Husserl’s theory of meaning consciousness from his 1901 Logical Investigations is internally inconsistent and falls apart upon closer inspection. I show that Husserl, in 1901, describes non-intuitive meaning consciousness as a direct parallel or as a ‘mirror’ of intuitive consciousness. He claims that non-intuitive meaning acts, like intuitions, have substance and represent their objects. I reveal that, by defining meaning acts in this way, Husserl cannot account for our experiences (...) of countersensical, absurd, or impossible meanings. Second, I examine how Husserl came to recognize this 1901 mistake in his 1913/14 Revisions to the Sixth Logical Investigation. I discuss how he accordingly reformulates his understanding of non-intuitive meaning acts from the ground up in those Revisions, where this also allows for him to properly account for the experience of impossible meanings. Instead of describing them as mirrors of intuitions, Husserl takes non-intuitive meaning acts to be modifications of intuitions, where they have no substance and do not represent their objects. Finally, in the conclusion to this essay, I demonstrate how this fundamental change to his understanding of meaning consciousness forced Husserl to revise other central tenets of his philosophy, such that the trajectory of his thought can only be properly understood in light of these revisions to his theory of non-intuitive meaning consciousness. (shrink)

This article tries to examine Husserl's theory of signification and reference, while presenting a content-oriented view of theory of intentionality and proposing the theory of the ideality of meaning, and thus explores the relation between Being and consciousness under the category of "objectivity" in logical investigation; Because the relationship between Being and consciousness must be sought at the intersection of theory of intentionality and objectivity. This intersection can be proposed in the truth condition of the objectivity of meaning, which acts (...) as the decisive result of Husserl's theory of signification and reference; to this reason, after presenting Husserl's critique of Brentano's causal theory of intentionality, this paper introduces a adverbial reading of theory of intentionality which is Husserl's specific theory of intentionality in logical investigation. According to this theory, the subject always pays attention to the object from his perspective, and this is called the perspectival subjectivity, which is the intrinsic characteristic of the subject. We will then show that the theory of the ideality of meaning is the result of the threefold structure of Husserl's intentionality and the content-oriented view of intentionality. Contrary to the claim of this theory that its true and inherent characteristic is intentionally its phenomenological aspect, the theory of reference and its corresponding meaning cannot satisfy the condition of the objectivity of meaning; Thus, theory of intentionality is based on an inadequate content-oriented attitude. (shrink)

This article aims to analyze the theory of truth contained in Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations. In my analysis, I start from a detailed description of conditions of the possibility of truth based on Husserl’s alethiology. I show that his theory assumes correlation, the parallelism between subjective and objective conditions of the possibility of cognition as a condition of truth. Based on this, I explain Husserl’s interpretation of the correspondence definition of truth found in Logical Investigations. I also provide arguments that (...) this interpretation presupposes the ontological definition of truth and the idea of the infinite intellect as the ideal of a direct and exhaustive presentation of the object of cognition. Nonetheless, my conclusions don’t provide a complete interpretation of Husserl’s alethiology because I refrain from drawing metaphysical consequences from it. That is to say, I neither answer the question about realism/idealism in Logical Investigations nor the question of whether the idea of the infinite intellect should be understood in some metaphysical way (e.g. theistic one) or only as a regulative idea in the Kantian sense. (shrink)

This article explores Jan Patočka’s notion of “asubjective phenomenology,” which the Czech philosopher elaborated in the mature phase of his thought. More specifically, it proposes to analyze that notion in light of Patočka’s interpretation of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, in which he identifies the original, though implicit, possibility of a phenomenology independent of a subjective foundation. In the first part of the paper, the author offers an interpretation of Husserls’ concept of “theory in general” as the original model of the (...) Patočkan phenomenal field, which, just like the logical dimension thematized by Husserl in the Prolegomena to Pure Logic, is independent of both objective structures and subjective conditions. It is reasonable to assume that the absence, in Logical Investigations, of “transcendental consciousness,” inspired Patočka in conceiving the manifestation of the object as a thing’s “showing-itself.” This idea is advanced in the second part of the article. Lastly, the final section of the article discusses the concept of “representative” as the second and most significant seed of “asubjective phenomenology” that can be retraced in Husserl’s Logical Investigations. (shrink)

Phenomenology and structuralism are commonly understood as two opposing and largely incompatible schools of thought. Indeed, if the former is thought of as the philosophy of subjectivity par excellence, and the latter as the tradition in which the “death of man” is declared, it seems difficult to challenge the antagony between them. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that this picture represents an oversimplification and turns out to be, to a great extent, fallacious. The aim of this paper is (...) to show that the philosophy of the early Husserl – notably as exposed in the Logical Investigations – ought to be fully considered as both part of the wide tradition of Transcendental philosophy as well as Structuralism. To this end, the paper mainly addresses Husserl’s notion of Wissenschaftslehre and the mereology developed in the Third logical investigation and, as a result, tries to show how Husserl’s position can be defined in terms of a “phenomenological structuralism” or a “structural phenomenology” or, as I propose, a “transcendental structuralism”. (shrink)

This paper accomplishes two goals. First, the essay elucidates Husserl’s descriptions of meaning consciousness from the 1901 Logical Investigations. I examine Husserl’s observations about the three ways we can experience meaning and I discuss his conclusions about the structure of meaning intentions. Second, the paper explores how Husserl reworked that 1901 theory in his 1913/14 Revisions to the Sixth Investigation. I explore how Husserl transformed his descriptions of the three intentions involved in meaningful experience. By doing so, Husserl not only (...) recognized intersubjective communication as the condition of possibility of linguistic meaning acts, but also transformed his account of the structure of both signitive and intuitive acts. In the conclusion, I cash out this analysis, by showing how, on the basis of these new insights, Husserl reconstructs his theory of fulfillment. (shrink)

This paper examines the evolution of Husserl’s philosophy of nonintuitive intentions. The analysis has two stages. First, I expose a mistake in Husserl’s account of non-intuitive acts from his 1901 Logical Investigations. I demonstrate that Husserl employs the term “signitive” too broadly, as he concludes that all non-intuitive acts are signitive. He states that not only meaning acts, but also the contiguity intentions of perception are signitive acts. Second, I show how Husserl, in his 1913/14 Revisions to the Sixth Logical (...) Investigation, amends his 1901 theory of non-intuitive acts, which he now calls “empty” intentions. He there accurately distinguishes empty meaning acts from the empty intentions of perception. In the conclusion, I reveal how Husserl’s alterations to his theory of non-intuitive intentions can inform our understanding of a larger shift in his philosophy. (shrink)

This essay critically assesses Roman Ingarden’s 1915 review of the second edition of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations. I elucidate and critique Ingarden’s analysis of the differences between the 1901 first edition and the 1913 second edition. I specifically examine three tenets of Ingarden’s interpretation. First, I demonstrate that Ingarden correctly denounces Husserl’s claim that he only engages in an eidetic study of consciousness in 1913, as Husserl was already performing eidetic analyses in 1901. Second, I show that Ingarden is misguided, (...) when he asserts that Husserl had fully transformed his philosophy into a transcendental idealism in the second edition. While Husserl does appear to adopt a transcendental phenomenology by asserting–in his programmatic claims–that the intentional content and object are now included in his domain of research, he does not alter his actual descriptions of the intentional relationship in any pertinent manner. Third, I show Ingarden correctly predicts many of the insights Husserl would arrive at about logic in his late philosophy. This analysis augments current readings of the evolution of Ingarden’s philosophy, by more closely examining the development of his largely neglected early thought. I execute this critical assessment by drawing both from Husserl’s later writings and from recent literature on the Investigations. By doing so, I hope to additionally demonstrate how research on the Investigations has matured in the one hundred years since the release of that text, while also presenting my own views concerning these difficult interpretative issues. (shrink)

In the final book of Logical Investigations from 1901, Husserl develops a theory of knowledge based on the intentional structure of consciousness. While there is some textual evidence that Husserl considered this to entail a critique of Kantian philosophy, he did not elaborate substantially on this. This paper reconstructs the covert critique of Kant’s theory of knowledge which LI contains. With respect to Kant, I discuss three core aspects of his theory of knowledge which, as Husserl’s reflections on Kant indicate, (...) Husserl was familiar with. These are the cooperation of two faculties for the justification of beliefs; the concept of a priori structures of knowledge Kant operated with; and the delivered transcendental proof of these structures. Regarding Logical Investigations, I first briefly outline the intentional structure of consciousness as presented in the fifth book and then turn to the theory of knowledge in the sixth book. I then clarify, partially on the basis of manuscripts and lecture notes, the covert critique of the three core aspects of Kant’s theory which the sixth book contains. (shrink)

In the Logical Investigations, Husserl argues that “sign” is an ambiguous word because it refers to two essentially different signitive functions: indication and expression. Indications work in an evidential way, providing information through a direct association of the sign and the presence of an object or state of affairs. Expressions work in a non-evidential way, pointing to possible experiences and displaying that the speaker or someone else has had such experience. In this paper I show that Husserl went back to (...) the distinction between indications and expressions in a much later text, a manuscript from 1931, in order to distinguish between two kinds of communication with different essential features. I call these indicative and expressive communication. My claim is that Husserl’s distinction between these two types of communication is a crucial contribution to the phenomenology of knowledge sharing. In knowledge sharing, we appropriate someone else’s knowledge as someone else’s knowledge. Husserl shows that only expressive communication, and not indicative communication, makes this appropriation possible. Since Husserl argues that only humans use expressive communication, his analysis of indicative and expressive communication is also a contribution to understanding the uniquely human capacity for accumulating knowledge. (shrink)

This paper deals with the semantic theory of indexicality expressed in Logical Investigations, integrating it with some aspects of John Perry’s work on the same topic. My intention is to show some unexpected affinities between these two studies and draw attention to the value of their different conclusions. In particular, I will refer to the problem of the role of intuition to understand whether and in which sense the context of utterance is semantically determining within the expressive act. Moreover I (...) will try to clarify the way the indexical meaning is described by Husserl and Perry: their solutions are similar as far as they split the meaning sphere in a twofold partition – roughly consisting of a descriptive and indicating part on one hand, and a content on the other one – but nevertheless different because of the ontological status granted to the content. This will appear to be related to the different way they interpret their common choice to make the act, and not the object, the key of the argument. (shrink)

This paper draws together as many as possible of the clues and pieces of the puzzle surrounding T. S. Eliot’s “infamous” literary term “objective correlative”. Many different scholars have claimed many different sources for the term, in Pound, Whitman, Baudelaire, Washington Allston, Santayana, Husserl, Nietzsche, Newman, Walter Pater, Coleridge, Russell, Bradley, Bergson, Bosanquet, Schopenhauer and Arnold. This paper aims to rewrite this list by surveying those individuals who, in different ways, either offer the truest claim to being the source of (...) the term, or contributed the most to Eliot’s development of it: Allston, Husserl, Bradley and Bergson. What the paper will argue is that Eliot’s possible inspiration for the term is more indebted to the idealist tradition, and Bergson’s aesthetic development of it, than to the phenomenology of Husserl. (shrink)

This paper accomplishes two tasks. First, I examine in detail Edmund Husserl’s earliest philosophy of surrogates, as it is found in his 1890 “On the Logic of Signs ”. I analyze his psychological and logical investigations of surrogates, where the former is concerned with explaining how these signs function and the latter with how they do so reliably. His differentiation of surrogates on the basis of their genetic origins and degrees of necessity is discussed. Second, the historical importance of this (...) text is disclosed by showing how Semiotic serves as both the inspiration for, and the foil to, Husserl’s 1901 First Logical Investigation. Husserl not only adopts the idea that linguistic signs can function via association, but also maintains that such signs can motivate me to execute one of two experiences. The key difference between the texts is that Husserl abandons his theory of surrogates in 1901, instead holding that I can experience absent objects by means of empty intentions. The reasons why Husserl found it necessary to transform this tenet of his philosophy are discussed at length. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 2, pp 221 - 256 In the following paper we will seek to understand what Edmund Husserl, in his second _Logical Investigation_, refers to as “idealism”, against the backdrop of Rudolf Hermann Lotze’s interpretation of Plato’s doctrine of Ideas in the third book of his _Logic_. This will raise not only the question of Husserl’s indebtedness to Lotze with respect to the _Ideenhlehre_ in terms of _Geltung_, but first and foremost that of the “Platonism” of (...) the idealism defended in his first masterpiece. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is provide an overview of Husserl’s thoughts about meaning, such as they are exposed in his Logical Investigations. Specifically, our interpretation is framed in the context of the First one, in which the author performs a complex analysis about the types of acts involved in the utterance of all expressions. However, unlike some other theories of indirect reference, what is peculiar to the Husserl’s conception is that implies a different relation to objects, namely, the (...) intentionality. This one, as an intrinsic character of some mental states, is the axis on which turns the notion of meaning, and enables that their appropriate correlates be obtained. Therefore is not a relational phenomenon, strictly speaking, what which is paradoxical. (shrink)

Este ensaio examina a explicação de Husserl sobre o que afinal acontece quando ocorre a compreensão. Os tópicos de sua Primeira Investigação Lógica são familiares ao ponto de serem menosprezadas: distinções essenciais envolvendo atos conferidores de significação e preenchedores de significação e seus conteúdos, caracterizações dos atos conferidores de significação, a flutuação dos significados das palavras e a idealidade das unidades de significação, e os conteúdos fenomenológico e ideal das vivências de significação. Uma vez feitas as distinções essenciais, a investigação (...) abre um caminho direto. Ela conduz dos atos psiquicamente reais de significação e seus conteúdos subjetivamente flutuantes às significações logicamente ideais e seus conteúdos objetivamente constantes. Dado que aparentemente a estratégia de Husserl para lidar com expressões essencialmente ocasionais e suas significações aparentemente flutuantes pode funcionar para a Lógica pura, com sua necessidade de rigor de identidade e determinação de sentido, mas não, entretanto, para o discurso ordinário, parece que a Primeira Investigação Lógica não pode prover uma explicação sobre a compreensão. Contudo, este ensaio tenta mostrar que Husserl apresenta uma hermenêutica fundamental na Primeira Investigação Lógica e que ela se volta da linguística para a ontologia, ou de ‘meras palavras’ para as ‘coisas elas mesmas’.: This paper examines Husserl’s account of what then happens when understanding takes place. The topics of his First Logical Investigation are familiar to the point of contempt: essential distinctions involving meaning-conferring and meaning-fulfilling acts and their contents, characterizations of meaning-conferring acts, the fluctuation of word meanings and the ideality of meaning unities, and the phenomenological and ideal contents of the experiences of meaning. Once the essential distinctions have been made, the investigation clears a straight path. It leads from mentally real acts of meaning and their subjectively fluctuating contents to logically ideal meanings and their objectively constant contents. Because it appears that Husserl’s strategy for dealing with essentially occasional expressions and their apparently fluctuating meanings may work for pure logic, with its need for strictness of identity and determinacy of sense, but not for ordinary discourse, however, it seems that the First Logical Investigation cannot provide an account of understanding. Yet this paper attempts to show that Husserl presents a foundational hermeneutics in the First Logical Investigation and that it turns from linguistics to ontology, or from ‘mere words’ to ‘things themselves’. Keywords: Understanding. Hermeneutics. Phenomenology. Husserl. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre’s early phenomenological texts reveal the complexity of his relationship to Edmund Husserl. Deeply indebted to phenomenology’s method as well as its substance, Sartre nonetheless confronted Husserl’s transcendental turn from Ideas onward. Although numerous studies have focused on Sartre’s points of contention with Husserl, drawing attention to his departure from Husserlian phenomenology, scholars have rarely examined the way in which Sartre engaged and responded to the early Husserl, particularly to his discussions of intentionality, consciousness, and self in Logical Investigations. (...) This essay focuses on Sartre’s critical response to Logical Investigations, arguing that Husserl’s understanding of these three notions shapes and informs Sartre’s own approach to them in The Transcendence of the Ego, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology”, and Being and Nothingness. By carefully reading Sartre side by side with Husserl, this essay arti... (shrink)

This is a translation from Russian to English of Nikolai Onufriyevich Lossky’s review of the first Russian translation of volume one of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, which was translated by E. A. Berstein and published in 1909 by a Petersburgian editor. The review appeared in the Muscovite philosophical journal Pyccкaя мыcль in 1909. In this short text, Lossky expresses his agreement with Husserl’s early anti-psychologism in logic. He also manifests his stance against logical and axiological relativism and naturalism. As an ontological (...) realist, Lossky thought he had found in the author of the Logische Untersuchungen an ally against the subjectivistic trends then still prevalent in Germany. The review is significant in intellectual history for its vanguard role in the Rezeptionsgeschichte of Husserl’s thought in Russia. (shrink)

This essay explores questions first posed by Ernst Tugendhat: Can Edmund Husserl’s conception of truth help philosophers connect the concept of propositional truth with a more comprehensive and life-oriented idea of truth? Can it do so without short-circuiting either side? If so, to what extent? I focus on the conception of truth in Husserl’s path breaking Logical Investigations, originally published in 1900-01. First, I review critical interpretations of Husserl by three influential post-Heideggerian philosophers: Emmanuel Levinas, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Derrida. (...) Next, I examine selected passages in the Logical Investigations. Finally, I initiate a critical retrieval of early Husserl’s conception of truth, one that not only evaluates his contribution in light of influential assessments by Levinas, Adorno, and Derrida but also proposes revisions to it. (shrink)

In appearance, Husserl’s writings seem not to have had any influence on linguistic research, nor does what the German philosopher wrote about language seem to be worth a place in the history of linguistics. The purpose of the paper is exactly to contrast this view, by reassessing both the position and the role of Husserl’s early masterpiece — the Logical Investigations — within the history of linguistics. To this end, I will focus mainly on the third (On the theory of (...) wholes and parts) and fourth (The distinction between independent and non-independent meanings) Investigations, paying special attention to Husserl’s mereology and to the idea of a general pure grammar. The paper tries to situate the third and fourth Logical Investigation within the general context of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century linguistics and furthermore attempts to show the historical and theoretical importance of the Logical Investigations for the birth and the development of one of the most important linguistic “schools” of the twentieth century, namely structural linguistics. (shrink)

This study is a commentary on Carl Stumpf's evaluation of Husserl's phenomenology as presented in the Logical Investigations and the first book of Ideas. I first examine Stumpf's reception of the version of phenomenology that Husserl presented in the Logical Investigations and I then look at §§ 85-86 of Ideas I, in which Husserl seeks to demarcate his "pure" phenomenology from that of Stumpf. In the third section, I analyze the criticism that Stumpf, in § 13 of his book Erkenntnislehre, (...) directs toward to the new version of phenomenology that Husserl develops in Ideas I, and in the fourth, I summarize the Spinozist interpretation of the noetico-noematical correlations that Stumpf proposes in his two studies on Spinoza. The last section addresses Husserl's self-criticism regarding the Cartesian aproach to the reduction in Ideas I and the parallelism that the late Husserl establishes between intentional psychology and transcendental phenomenology. I try to show that the version of phenomenology that Husserl develops during the Freiburg period anticipates in many respects Stumpf's criticism and partly confirms the latter's diagnosis of the version of phenomenology advocated in Ideas I. (shrink)

Although Husserl is known for having developed a substantial theory of subjectivity across his transcendental phenomenology, he explicitly and purposefully left aside the question of the subject in his early groundwork, the Logical Investigations. This article investigates the reasons for this philosophical decision and claims that the theory of indexical meanings developed in the first and sixth Logical Investigations provides a sophisticated analysis of the first-person pronoun that legitimates Husserl’s choice: in the absence of a fully-fledged concept of subjectivity in (...) Husserl’s early works, the theory of “occasional expressions” addresses the question of the subject by examining the phenomenological conditions of one’s ability to meaningfully make use of the pronoun “I”. The article argues against Derrida’s reading of the first Logical Investigation that the expression of the first-person is somehow insensitive to the prospect of intuitive presencing and epistemic fulfilment. (shrink)

This article presents itself as an attempt to explain Proust’s expression, “The matter of experience”, from Husserl’s concept of Materie in the Logical Investigations. This Husserlian concept will enable us to rethink the “matter” of experience, as being both intrinsically determined and intrinsically “relational”. Husserl uses this concept of Materie in two main senses. In the fifth Logical Investigation, it is used in order to define the “content” of the act and this concept will be explained in its own equivocation, (...) as it both means the direction of the act and the ideal “signification” which prescribes this very determination. The concept of Materie is also used in the third Logical Investigation to designate the “content” of the object, and will also be explained in its own equivocation, as it both means the individual determination of the object and its essential determination. In the last part of this study, a few of the difficulties which are brought by this double equivocation of Husserl’s concept of Materie will be exposed, and a few programmatic solutions for its redefinition as the unique “matter” of our experience, will be proposed. This investigation might eventually imply a definition of phenomenology itself, as the very experience of this matter. (shrink)

This essay has two parts. In the first one I try to show the crucial importance of Husserl’s phenomenology (Logische Untersuchungen and Ideen I) in Ortega’s thought at least till 1929. In this period it is not an exaggeration to say that Ortega understands his philosophy as a peculiar development of Husserl’s theory of intentionality. After this date, and influenced by the publication Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, he begins to consider Husserlian thought as the last and more refined form of (...) idealism. The antidote against it should be a philosophy of vital or historical reason, a form of non-idealistic phenomenology, which is close to the existential one. (shrink)

Ce travail porte sur la question du remplissement des visées d’objets idéaux. Dans la VI e Recherche logique Husserl soulève cette question en introduisant un nouveau concept : le concept d’intuition catégoriale. La connaissance des objets idéaux passe selon Husserl par un remplissement qui se réalise au moyen d’une intuition particulière, dans laquelle l’objet idéal se donne en personne, et qui s’oppose à l’intuition sensible. Dans quelle mesure une telle intuition est-elle possible ? Qu’est-ce qui est à proprement parler intuitionné (...) en elle et comment cette intuition se rapporte-t-elle aux intuitions sensibles ? Telles sont les principales questions que je soulèverai dans cette étude. Ce travail me permettra ensuite de formuler un diagnostic sur les tensions qui persistent dans les Recherches logiques , et qui ne seront résolues que par la réduction transcendantale. (shrink)

An act’s form of apprehension (Auffassungsform) determines whether it is a perception, an imagination, or a signitive act. It must be distinguished from the act’s quality, which determines whether the act is, for instance, assertoric, merely entertaining, wishing, or doubting. The notion of form of apprehension is explained by recourse to the so-called content–apprehension model (Inhalt-Auffassung Schema); it is characteristic of the Logical Investigations that in it all objectifying acts are analyzed in terms of that model. The distinction between intuitive (...) and signitive acts is made, and the notion of saturation (Fu ̈lle) is described, by recourse to the notion of form of apprehension. (shrink)

Husserl introduces a phenomenological concept called “motivation” early in the First Investigation of his magnum opus, the Logical Investigations. The importance of this concept has been overlooked since Husserl passes over it rather quickly on his way to an analysis of the meaningful nature of expression. I argue, however, that motivation is essential to Husserl’s overall project, even if it is not essen- tial for defining expression in the First Investigation. For Husserl, motivation is a relation between mental acts whereby (...) the content of one act make some fur- ther meaningful content probable. I explicate the nature of this relation in terms of “evidentiary weight” and differentiate it from Husserl’s notion of Evidenz, often translated as “self-evidence”. I elucidate the importance of motivation in Husserl’s overall phenomenological project by focusing on his analyses of thing-perception and empathy. Through these examples, we can better understand the continuity between the Logical Investigations and Husserl’s later work. (shrink)

Is phenomenology nothing else than descriptive psychology? In the first edition of his Logical Investigations, Husserl conceived of phenomenology as a description and analysis of the experiences of knowledge, unequivocally stating that “phenomenology is descriptive psychology.” Most interestingly, although the first edition of the LI was the reference par excellence in phenomenology for the Munich phenomenologists, they remained suspicious of this characterisationof phenomenology. The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the reception of descriptive psychology among Munich (...) phenomenologists and, at the same time, to offer a re-evaluation of their understanding of realist phenomenology. (shrink)

Why do I have to be ethical? That is the essential question of a logical foundation of ethics in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. This article proposes to see the basic motivation of an ethical reason in the relationship between the two fundamental poles, that is the «Lifeworld» («Lebenswelt») and the «I-subject» («Ich-Subjekt»). This connection will be considered to constitute ethics in this article. This kind of ethics as a «condition of possibility» is then an a-priori ontological necessity. The article (...) will demonstrate how the composition of Husserl’s Prolegomena and his argumentation are an example of a foundation for phenomenological ethics: in this book Husserl derived logic as the first «condition of possibility». With logic’s three main characteristics — theory, normativity and praxis — it is the theoretical basis of a phenomenological ethics. (shrink)

In Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, contradiction is characterized as sense, that is to say it’s an expression, and not a nonsensical formulation. This fact is shown by Husserl’s characterization of noetic sense, which can be entirely found within the intentional essence of the act: this means that comprehensibility is what is required for a formulation to be noetically sensical, even if it’s somehow morphologically ‘incomplete’ or if it doesn’t admit any possible fulfilment.

In this paper I discuss whether there is a specific experience of thinking or not. I address this question by analysing if it is possible to reduce the phenomenal character of thinking to the phenomenal character of sensory experiences. My purpose is to defend that there is a specific phenomenality for at least somethinking mental states. I present Husserl's theory of intentionality in the Logical Investigations as a way to defend this claim and I consider its assumptions. Then I present (...) the case of understanding as a paradigmatic case for the phenomenal contrast argument and I defend it against two objections. (shrink)

Introduction Dans ses Prolegomena zur reinen Logik ( Logische Untersuchungen, 1900), Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) offre une analyse et un exemple assez mémorables de ce qu’est une norme (pour ceux qui n’y sont pas familiers, la traduction française du passage le plus significatif est reproduite dans l’Appendice 1 de cet essai). Dire « un guerrier doit être courageux » revient à dire : « Un guerrier courageux est bon. » À l’évidence, ceci transforme une norme en jugement de valeur. Husserl exprime (...) cette équivalence directement, c’est-à-dire qu’il ne décrit ni n’analyse la manière dont les normes sont constituées et justifiées. Je n’ai pas répertorié d’analyse réfléchie sur ce sujet dans le reste de ses publications et, s’il existe semblable analyse dans son Nachlass , je n’en ai pas connaissance . Le présent compte rendu n’est, en aucun cas, une interprétation des textes de Husserl mais une brève tentative visant à élaborer une phénoménologie constitutive dans la manière du Husserl de la maturité. Dans la première section ci-dessous, je tente de développer l’exemple de Husserl de façon dynamique. Dans la deuxième, je prends un référent purement possible de ses propositions comme indice relatif aux composantes de la situation où se constituent des cas de ce type. Dans la troisième section, j’examine brièvement la manière dont les normes peuvent être justifiées. La conduite à adopter lors d’un. (shrink)

Las "Investigaciones Lógicas" han marcado la filosofía contemporánea como quizá ningún otro libro lo haya hecho. Sin embargo, la edición original se ha interpretado casi siempre desde la segunda, es decir, desde un estadio posterior y esencialmente diferente del desarrollo de la escuela fenomenológica. Edmund Husserl, en efecto, no permitió que su gran obra se reeditara sin modificarla muy hondamente, de acuerdo con las tesis nuevas de la fenomenología transcendental. Tampoco consintió traducciones que no se hicieran sobre la edición corregida. (...) De este modo, el contenido real de las primitivas Investigaciones se olvidó. No se tuvo presente en su justa medida hasta qué punto la psicognosia y la metafísica de Franz Brentano habían influido en Husserl. Este libro permite leer los Prolegómenos a la Lógica Pura tal como aparecieron primitivamente. Además, ofrece ya una clave hermenéutica global sobre el conjunto de las Investigaciones, cuya traducción comentada queda reservada para un volumen futuro. (shrink)