Husserl: Science, Logic, and Mathematics

This study purports a unifying view of the ontology of mathematics and fiction presented in Husserl’s 1894 manuscript “Intentional Objects” [Intentionale Gegenstände] in relation to his theory of manifolds. In particular, I clarify that Husserl’s argument supposes deductive systems of mathematical theories and fictional work as well as their “correlates,” which are mathematical manifolds in the former cases. This unifying view concretizes the concept of manifolds as an ontological concept that is not bound to mathematics. Although mathematical and fictional objects (...) differ in whether they are purely formal or materially filled, the concept of manifolds can be extended to admit materially filled objects, thus encompassing the two into the unitary theory of manifolds. By contrast, reviewing the subsequent developments of Husserl’s theory of manifolds naturally leads to restricting its concept to be strictly formal. This notion is consistent with the view that describes manifolds as forms of worlds and states of affairs; however, I suggest that the concept of the manifold is more fundamental than the concept of the world and state of affairs. (shrink)

part, whole, ideal quality, foundation, unity, space, topoontology, topophilosophy, formal ontology, topology, mathematical philosophy, topology, topology of the person, topology of mind, mathematics in philosophy, mereology, mereotopology, phenomenology, Benedict Bornstein, Edmund Husserl, Roman Ingarden, Kurt Lewin, René Thom.

In this reply to my reviewers, I touch upon Husserl’s notion of fantasy. Whereas Kant positions fantasy outside the scope of his own work, Husserl brings it back. The importance of this notion lies in freeing imagination from the tight link to images, as for Husserl imagination is an activity that functions as a “quasi perception.” Ihde and Stiegler enrich Husserl’s analysis of imagination with various aspects of technology: Ihde shows how changes in the technologies that mediate our imagination will (...) necessarily change our imagination; Stiegler broadens Husserl’s analysis of retention. The two theories can be combined into a new understanding of subjectivity that is modeled as layers. Some layers can be performed by AI. The second part deals with the question of whether AI can be imaginative. Traditionally, imaginative creativity is associated with art. Bioart and AI art are brought as examples of a new definition of art, according to which art is the arrangement of materials in a way that produces a meaning. This definition does not refer specifically to creativity. In both forms of art, the biological/artificial and the human cooperate so that the former arranges the materials and the latter produces the meaning, albeit this division of labor is not clear-cut. The result is a co-shaping process. My conclusion is that algorithms can be considered creative by human standards, but this entails a new mode of imagination that is co-shaped and co-shared by humans and algorithms. The layer paradigm explains how such co-shaping works in practice. (shrink)

The question of the psychologism of the theory of number developed by Husserl in his Philosophy of Arithmetic has long been debated, but it cannot be considered fully resolved. In this paper, I address the issue from a new point of view. My claim is that in the Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl made, albeit indirectly, a series of arguments that are worth reconstructing and clarifying since they are useful in shedding some light on the psychologism issue. More specifically, I maintain (...) that the clarification of these arguments, along with other arguments that Husserl presented against alternative theories of number as well as with some contemporary distinctions concerning the notion of ontological dependence, allows us to determine that Husserl’s theory of number is psychologistic in a minimal and precise sense: it entails a generic ontological dependence of numbers upon the mind. (shrink)

This essay presents Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929) in three main sections following the layout of the work itself. The first section focuses on Husserl’s introduction where he explains the method and the aim of the essay. The method used in FTL is radical Besinnung and with it an intentional explication of proper sense of formal logic is sought for. The second section is on formal logic. The third section focuses on Husserl’s “transcendental logic,” which is needed to make (...) Husserl’s conception complete, i.e., to understand what makes Besinnung radical, how the proper sense of formal logic has been reached and how all this relates to transcendental constitution of an object in the world. Husserl’s work is connected to his context (in exact sciences) and the relevance of his views for the contemporary approaches is discussed. (shrink)

El presupuesto según el cual el contenido de una manifestación compleja está en función de los contenidos de sus partes componentes, expresa claramente una intuición que solemos tener sobre lo múltiple; implica una reflexión sobre la relación entre el todo y las partes que lo componen; involucra una teoría de las multiplicidades que entraña atributos de naturaleza matemática; presenta el problema de cómo los seres humanos nos relacionamos con los entornos del mundo para generar unidad de sentido. La significación es (...) un proceso de síntesis. Y desentrañar los mecanismos de funcionamiento de dicho proceso es un enigma de carácter eminentemente fenomenológico. La matemática misma, como acto de significación, como conjunto de actos de contenidos intencionales, comparte este carácter y es susceptible de tratamiento fenomenológico. Noesis y semiosis se conjugan para dotar al saber matemático de un contenido, de articulación compleja, que trasciende las perspectivas meramente logicistas, formalistas o intuicionistas. Una primera aproximación a esta problemática es el propósito del presente trabajo. (shrink)

This article deals with the question of existence by considering the way in which phenomenology has faced this issue. To provide an argument against the ontological certainties typical of idealism and realism, I try to show the possibility of a subjective reduction of the question of existence and to highlight the way in which the concept of existence may be “undermined” by this reduction. A prominent place is given to the concept of infinity for radically reassessing the content and scope (...) of the concept of existence. I try to integrate some of the main themes of Husserlian phenomenology without being restrictively committed to it. I include some discussion of foundational mathematics and of quantum physics. (shrink)

Distinguishes two senses of 'judgment' on the one hand as meaning a state of 'conviction' or 'belief', and on the other hand as meaning an act of 'affirmation' or 'assertion'. Certainly conviction and assertion stand in close relation to each other, but they delineate two heterogeneous logical spheres, and thereby divide the total field of the theory of judgment into two neighbouring but separate sub-fields. Once this is done it is shown to have implications for our understanding especially of the (...) phenomenon of negation, and of the distinction between negation as affirmation of a negative state of affairs, and negation as act of contradicting the judgment someone else has made. (shrink)

Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics, his metatheory, and his transcendental phenomenology have a sophisticated and systematic interrelation that remains relevant for questions of ontology today. It is well established that Husserl anticipated many aspects of model theory. I focus on this aspect of Husserl’s philosophy in order to argue that Thomasson’s recent pleonastic reconstruction of Husserl’s approach to essences is incompatible with Husserl’s philosophy as a whole. According to the pleonastic approach, Husserl can appeal to essences in the absence of a (...) positive metaphysical account of their nature. I show, using central results from recent model theory, that the pleonastic approach undermines Husserl’s approach to formalization and categoricity, an effect that will ripple out from Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics into Husserl’s metatheory and transcendental phenomenology. The result is that Husserl cannot appeal to formal essences without metaphysical commitments. However, the very observations Thomasson makes about the nature of eidetic intuition in Husserl lead to a general strategy for responding to the problem. The article thus illustrates that the pleonastic and the model-theoretic routes for making Husserl relevant to present-day ontology are competing approaches, but I conclude that Husserl scholars seeking to set Husserl’s present-day relevance into sharp relief could do worse than to emphasize the model-theoretic nature of Husserl’s enterprise. (shrink)

The primary focus of this project is the silent and subvocal speech-recognition interface unveiled in 2018 as an ambulatory device wearable on the neck that detects a myoelectrical signature by electrodes worn on the surface of the face, throat, and neck. These emerge from an alleged “intending to speak” by the wearer silently-saying-something-to-oneself. This inner voice is believed to occur while one reads in silence or mentally talks to oneself. The artifice does not require spoken sounds, opening the mouth, or (...) any explicit or external movement of the lips. The essay then considers such subvocal “speech” as a mode of writing or saying and the interior of the mouth or oral cavity as its writing surface. It briefly revisits discussions of telepathy to recontextualize Heidegger’s warning against enframing language exclusively within calculative technics and physiology, which he suggests is detrimental to Mundarten (mouth-modes of regional dialects). It closes in reconsideration of Husserl’s phenomenology of language and meaning in Ideas as it might apply to subvocal speech-recognition interfaces. It suggests ways by which the electrophysiology that the device detects and deciphers (as an alleged intention of a presumed natural language unspoken vocally or aloud) might supplement Husserl’s insinuation of the Leiblichkeit of language through a self-stamping extraction of an extension of meaning. (shrink)

This paper accomplishes two goals. First, I elucidate Edmund Husserl’s theory of inauthentic judgments from his 1890 “On the Logic of Signs (Semiotic).” It will be shown how inauthentic judgments are distinct from other signitive experiences, in such a manner that when Husserl seeks to account for them, he is forced to revise the general structure of his philosophy of meaning and in doing so, is also able to realize novel insights concerning the nature of signification. Second, these conclusions are (...) revealed to be the foundation of Husserl’s pure logical grammar, found in the 1901 “Fourth Logical Investigation.” In his analysis of inauthentic judgments, Husserl already recognized, albeit in a problematic way and for entirely different reasons, many of the central tenets of the 1901 work concerning categoremata and syncategoremata, matter and form, and the isomorphism between them. (shrink)

This article accomplishes two goals. First, the paper clarifies Edmund Husserl’s investigation of the historical inception of the number system from his early works, Philosophy of Arithmetic and, “On the Logic of Signs (Semiotic)”. The article explores Husserl’s analysis of five historical developmental stages, which culminated in our ancestor’s ability to employ and enumerate with number signs. Second, the article reveals how Husserl’s conclusions about the history of the number system from his early works opens up a fusion point with (...) his investigations from his mature texts, The Crisis of the European Sciences and “The Origin of Geometry”. On the one hand, the essay shows that Husserl’s methodology was similar, as he sought in both his early and late writings to uncover the essence of the history of the formal sciences and was not executing mere intellectual history. On the other hand, the article discloses that Husserl’s insights from both time periods are strikingly analogous. Already in his early texts, Husserl saw that the sciences emerged from pre-theoretical experiences of the world and that the sciences are the result of a historical process, which involves the psychic activities of past individuals and the maintaining of discoveries over time by intersubjective communities. I conclude by showing how, in light of the analysis of this paper, we can rethink the evolution of Husserl’s philosophy. (shrink)

This article is primarily concerned with the articulation of a defensible position on the relevance of phenomenological analysis with the current epistemological edifice as this latter has evolved since the rupture with the classical scientific paradigm pointing to the Newtonian-Leibnizian tradition which took place around the beginning of 20th century. My approach is generally based on the reduction of the objects-contents of natural sciences, abstracted in the form of ideal objectivities in the corresponding logical-mathematical theories, to the content of meaning-acts (...) ultimately referring to a specific being-within-the-world experience. This is a position that finds itself in line with Husserl’s gradual departure from the psychologistic interpretations of his earlier works on the philosophy of logic and mathematics and culminates in a properly meant phenomenological foundation of natural sciences in his last major published work, namely the Crisis of European Sciences and the Transcendental Phenomenology. Further this article tries to set up a context of discourse in which to found both physical and formal objects in parallel terms as essentially temporal-noematic objects to the extent that they may be considered as invariants of the constitutional modes of a temporal consciousness. (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)

Husserl and Cantor were colleagues and close friends during the last 14 years of the nineteenth century, when Cantor was at the height of his creative powers and Husserl in the throes of an intellectual struggle during which he drew apart from people and writings to whom he owed most of his intellectual training and drew closer to the ideas of thinkers whose writings he had not been able to evaluate properly and had consulted too little. I study ways in (...) which Husserl and Cantor might be said to have been alike, while pointing to dissimilarities between them. In particular, I discuss how their ideas overlapped and crisscrossed with regard to mathematics and philosophy, Platonic idealism, abstraction, empiricism, psychologism, actual consciousness and pure logic, Frege’s reviews of their works, metaphysics and mysticism, sets, arithmetization, strange and imaginary numbers and manifolds. I conclude that Cantor was among those of his mentors from whose ideas Husserl drew away and Lotze and Bolzano were among those to whose ideas he drew closer. (shrink)

Kurt Gödel began to study the philosophy of Edmund Husserl in 1959. In this paper I present an overview of central themes in Gödel’s study of Husserl’s phenomenology. Since many of Gödel’s ideas concerning Husserl were never put into a systematic form by Gödel himself, I quote fairly extensively in the paper from several sources in order to inform the reader of the nature of Gödel’s interest in Husserl. Gödel prepared one manuscript specifically on Husserl, as we will see below, (...) and many of Gödel’s comments on Husserl are included in the books of Hao Wang. I will also quote some relevant texts from the Gödel Nachlass. In accordance with these various sources, I provide a brief overview in a later section of the paper of Gödel’s interest in eidetic transcendental phenomenology as a new type of monadology. The relationship of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems to Husserl’s notion of ‘definite’ axiom systems is also discussed briefly. (shrink)

In this article I try to articulate a defensible argumentation against the idea of an ontology of infinity. My position is phenomenologically motivated and in this virtue strongly influenced by the Husserlian reduction of the ontological being to a process of subjective constitution within the immanence of consciousness. However taking into account the historical charge and the depth of the question of infinity over the centuries I also include a brief review of the platonic and aristotelian views and also those (...) of Locke and Hume on the concept to the extent that they are relevant to my own discussion of infinity both in a purely philosophical and epistemological context. Concerning the latter context, I argue against Kanamori’s position, in The Infinite as Method in Set Theory and Mathematics, that the mathematical infinite can be accounted for solely in terms of epistemological articulation, that is, in the way it is approached, assimilated, and applied in the course of the construction of mathematical hierarchies. Instead I point to a subjectively constituted immanent ‘infinity’ in virtue of the a priori as well as factual characteristics of subjective constitution, underlying and conditioning any talk of infinity in an epistemological sense. From this viewpoint I also address some other positions on the question of a possible ontology of the mathematical infinite. My whole approach to the question of the infinite in an epistemological sense hinges on the assumption that the mathematical infinite subsumes the infinite of physical theories to the extent that physics and science in general deal with the infinite in terms of the corresponding mathematical language and the specific techniques involved. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus and Edmund Husserl’s Experience and Judgement (Erfahrung und Urteil) are based on remarkably different conceptual frameworks and methodologies. After analyzing their respective accounts on the foundations of (formal) logic, I map out their common aims and different conclusions. I hold that Husserl and Wittgenstein both use the epistemic necessity of the existence of logical relations among things as an argument against philosophical scepticism, but their different epistemological convictions lead them to decisively diverging accounts of the nature (...) of those relations. Wittgenstein assumes a syntactic correspondence theory of truth, which identifies general logical form as a necessary condition for accurate representation, apparent in the existence of local truth-functions between propositions. As logical form is the (transcendental) necessary condition of every meaningful proposition, he infers that it is itself not representable and without ontological status. Husserl, by contrast, does not draw from a correspondence theory, but from a processual theory of certainty and truth, which offers genetic instead of categorical distinctions between perception and the logical relations apparent in conceptual knowledge. His theory of formal logic ultimately offers a coherent ontology for logical objects, which avoids logical mysticism. (shrink)

This volume aims to provide the elements for a systematic exploration of certain fundamental notions of Peirce and Husserl in respect with foundations of science by means of drawing a parallelism between their works. Tackling a largely understudied comparison between these two contemporary philosophers, the authors highlight the significant similarities in some of their fundamental ideas. This volume consists of eleven chapters under four parts. The first part concerns methodologies and main principles of the two philosophers. An introductory chapter outlines (...) central historical and systematical themes arising out of the recent scholarship on Peirce and Husserl. The second part is on logic, its Chapters dedicated to the topics from Peirce’s Existential Graphs and the philosophy of notation to Husserl’s notions of pure logic and transcendental logic. The third part includes contributions on philosophy of mathematics. Chapters in the final part deal with the theory of cognition, consciousness and intentionality. The closing chapter provides an extended glossary of central terms of Peirce’s theory of phaneroscopy, explaining them from the viewpoint of the theory of cognition. (shrink)

I reconstruct my own journey into the history of the human sciences, which I show to have been a process of discovering the metaphysical standing of the human. I begin with Alexandre Koyré’s encounter with Edmund Husserl in the 1930s, which I use to throw light on the legacy of Kant’s ‘anthropological’ understanding of the human, which dominated and limited 19th-century science. As I show, those who broke from Kant’s strictures and set the stage for the 20th-century revolutions in science (...) - from Hegel, to John McTaggart, to Max Weber - typically were pursuing crypto-theological questions about how a finite being can comprehend an infinite universe. This journey is about the ‘common measure’ of being human, which is what links Plato to Kuhn, but has been most consistently taken up by law. I suggest that in seeking this ‘measure of man’, we may discover that to be human is not necessarily to be Homo sapiens, which would suggest a radical reorientation of the history of the human sciences. (shrink)

Le concept de Fundierung est introduit dans la IIIe Recherche Logique de Husserl et, malgré sa fonctionnalité apparente, il n’est pratiquement plus utilisé dans la suite de son oeuvre. En revanche, ce concept manifeste une puissance latente que le travail de Gian-Carlo Rota permet d’exalter. Entre les mains du mathématicienphilosophe, la Fundierung devient l’un des piliers fondamentaux d’une logique phénoménologique encore in fieri. Une logique qui voudrait prendre ses distances tant avec la « logique philosophique » traditionnelle qu’avec la « (...) logique mathématique » qui s’est désormais imposée en tant que standard de la rigueur et fascine souvent les philosophes. Cet article se propose de décrire comment l’interprétation de Rota enrichit le concept originel de Husserl et de quelle manière sa démarche ouvre la possibilité d’une évolution.The concept of Fundierung introduced by Husserl in his III Logic Research, notwithstanding its seemingly logical functionality, very rarely appears in his subsequent works. Yet this concept shows a latent power that Gian-Carlo Rota’s work succeeds in exalting. In the hands of the mathematician-philosopher, Fundierung becomes one of the fundamental pillars of a phenomenological logic still in embryo, a logic the aim of which is to distance itself from both the traditional ‘philosophical logic’ and the ‘mathematical logic’, the latter having by now become a standard of rigour by which the philosophers are often bewitched. This paper aims to describe how Rota’s interpretation has enhanced Husserl’s original concept and how this can foster a likely great evolution in the future. Il concetto di Fundierung appare nella IIIe Ricerca Logica di Husserl e, malgrado l’apparente funzionalità logica, appare molto raramente nel seguito della sua opera. Tuttavia tale concetto manifesta una potenza latente che il lavoro di Gian-Carlo Rota riesce ad esaltare. Nelle mani del matematico-filosofo, laFundierung diventa uno dei pilastri fondamentali di una logica fenomenologica ancora in fieri. Una logica che vorrebbe distanziarsi tanto dalla “logica filosofica” tradizionale quanto dalla “logica matematica” che ormai si è imposta come standard di rigore e di cui i filosofi subiscono spesso la fascinazione. Questo articolo si propone di descrivere quanto l’interpretazione di Rota arricchisca l’originale concetto husserliano e in che modo ciò permetta una grande possibilità di evoluzione.This article is in French. (shrink)

Gian-Carlo Rota a su concilier un travail mathématique exemplaire et des recherches philosophiques largement inspirées par la phénoménologie husserlienne. Son œuvre philosophique nous semble avoir de fait deux composantes : l’une s’intéresse majoritairement à des phénomènes universels. L’autre se déploie de façon plus subtile en filigrane de ses travaux mathématiques ; sans être thématisée comme telle – comme contribution philosophique –, elle alimente très lar-gement l’aura de Rota dans la communauté mathématique et justifie le rôle qu’il y joue de père (...) fondateur d’une école combinatoire. L’analyse de ces différents moments de sa pensée permet de mieux en cerner les ressorts, l’unité et la portée.Gian-Carlo Rota was able to combine a remarkable mathematical work with philosophical research largely inspired by Husserl’s phenomenology. His philosophical work has two components. One focuses mainly on universal phenomena in mathematics. The other unfolds in a more subtle way in his mathematical work; without being characterized as a proper philosophical contribution, it feeds largely the aura of Rota in the mathematical community and contributes to justify his role of founder of a school of combinatorics.The analysis of these different moments of his thought allows to understand better its origins, unit and scope. Gian-Carlo Rota ha saputo coniugare il propio lavoro matematico esemplare ad una ricerca filosofica in gran parte ispirata dalla fenomenologia di Husserl. La sua opera filosofica ha secondo noi due componenti: una riguarda principalmente i fenomeni universali. L’altra si sviluppa in modo più sottile nel suo lavoro matematico e, senza diventare un tema in quanto tale – come vero e pro-prio contributo filosofico –, alimenta in gran parte l’aura di Rota nella co-munità matematica, contribuendo a giustificare il suo ruolo di fondatore di una scuola combinatoria. L’analisi di questi diversi momenti del suo pensi-ero permette di identificarne meglio le origini, l’unità e la portata.This article is in French. (shrink)

RésuméGian-Carlo Rota est l’un des rares grands mathématiciens de la deuxième moitié du XX e siècle dont l’intérêt pour la logique formelle soit aussi ouvertement déclaré et ne se soit jamais démenti, depuis sa formation d’étudiant à Princeton jusqu’à ses derniers écrits. Plus exceptionnel encore, il fait partie des rares lecteurs assidus de Husserl à s’être aperçu que la phé-noménologie poursuivait un projet de réforme de la logique formelle. L’article propose d’attester l’existence d’un tel projet chez Husserl ; d’en examiner (...) la réappropriation et les prolongements chez Rota.Gian-Carlo Rota is among the few great mathematicians of the second-half of the XXth century whose interest in formal logic is openly declared and has never flagged, since his training as a student in Princeton up to his last writings. Even more exceptional, he belongs to the rare diligent readers of Husserl, who noticed that phenomenology was pursuing a project of reform of formal logic. This paper propose to testify to the existence of such a project in Husserl; to examine how it is taken over and continued by Rota. Gian-Carlo Rota è uno dei pochi grandi matematici della seconda metà del ventesimo secolo, il cui interesse per la logica formale è, dalla sua formazione come studente a Princeton al suo ultimi scritti, apertamente dichiarato e mai negato. Cosa ancora più eccezionale, Rota è uno dei rari lettori assidui di Husserl ad aver percepito che la fenomenologia stava perseguendo un progetto di riforma della logica formale. L’articolo propone di attestare l’esistenza di un tale progetto in Husserl e di esaminare la sua riappropriazione e le sue estensioni proposte da Gian-Carlo Rota.This article is in French. (shrink)

This paper explicates Husserl’s usage of what he calls “radical Besinnung” in Formale und transzendentale Logik. Husserl introduces radical Besinnung as his method in the introduction to FTL. Radical Besinnung aims at criticizing the practice of formal sciences by means of transcendental phenomenological clarification of its aims and presuppositions. By showing how Husserl applies this method to the history of formal sciences down to mathematicians’ work in his time, the paper explains in detail the relationship between historical critical Besinnung and (...) transcendental phenomenology. Ultimately the paper suggests that radical Besinnung should be viewed as a general methodological framework within which transcendental phenomenological descriptions are used to criticize historically given goal-directed practices. (shrink)

The paper discusses Husserl’s notion of definiteness as presented in his Göttingen Mathematical Society Double Lecture of 1901 as a defense of two, in many cases incompatible, ideals, namely full characterizability of the domain, i.e., categoricity, and its syntactic completeness. These two ideals are manifest already in Husserl’s discussion of pure logic in the Prolegomena: The full characterizability is related to Husserl’s attempt to capture the interconnection of things, whereas syntactic completeness relates to the interconnection of truths. In the Prolegomena (...) Husserl argues that an ideally complete theory gives an independent norm for objectivity for logic and experiential sciences, hence the notion is central to his argument against psychologism. In the Double Lecture the former is captured by non-extendibility, that is, categoricity of the domain, from which, so Husserl assumes, syntactic completeness is thought to follow. In the so-called ‘mathematical manifolds’ the expressions of the theory are equations that are reducible to equations between elements of the theory. With such an equational reduction structure individual elements of the domain are given criteria of identity and hence they are fully determined. (shrink)

In his book, 'History as a Science and the System of the Sciences', Thomas Seebohm articulates the view that history can serve to mediate between the sciences of explanation and the sciences of interpretation, that is, between the natural sciences and the human sciences. Among other things, Seebohm analyzes history from a phenomenological perspective to reveal the material foundations of the historical human sciences in the lifeworld. As a preliminary to his analyses, Seebohm examines the formal and material presuppositions of (...) phenomenological epistemology, as well as the emergence of the human sciences and the traditional distinctions and divisions that are made between the natural and the human sciences. -/- As part of this examination, Seebohm devotes a section to discussing Husserl’s formal mereology because he understands that a reflective analysis of the foundations of the historical sciences requires a reflective analysis of the objects of the historical sciences, that is, of concrete organic wholes (i.e., social groups) and of their parts. Seebohm concludes that Husserl’s mereological ontology needs to be altered with regard to the historical sciences because the relations between organic wholes and their parts are not summative relations. Seebohm’s conclusion is relevant for the issue of the reducibility of organic wholes such as social groups to their parts and for the issue of the reducibility of the historical sciences to the lower-order sciences, that is, to the sciences concerned with lower-order ontologies. -/- In this paper, I propose to extend Seebohm’s conclusion to the ontology of chemical wholes as object of quantum chemistry and to argue that Husserl’s formal mereology is descriptively inadequate for this regional ontology as well. This may seem surprising at first, since the objects studied by quantum chemists are not organic wholes. However, my discussion of atoms and molecules as they are understood in quantum chemistry will show that Husserl’s classical summative and extensional mereology does not accurately capture the relations between chemical wholes and their parts. This conclusion is relevant for the question of the reducibility of chemical wholes to their parts and of the reducibility of chemistry to physics, issues that have been of central importance within the philosophy of chemistry for the past several decades. (shrink)

THE VIRTUAL OF PHENOMENOLOGY IN PHYSICS. THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY LIKE PROOF BENCH OF TEMPORALITY AND KINAESTHESIA. FROM EINSTEIN AND HUSSERL’S MANUSCRIPTS The search for objective knowledge purports to aim at a reality independent of our experience of it, but we find ourselves dependent upon our sense experience as the only possible access to this purportedly independent reality that is the object of science. Husserl’s phenomenological point of view reveals how this aim is understandable, and, as the major developments in (...) twentieth-century physics have shown, how science must take account of the way that virtual forms of our thinking play a key role in capturing the phenomena scientists describe and explain. What this paper claims to prove is the epistemological evidence of an unavoidable relationship between the virtual and real that are described through the formal sciences and the concrete objects that they purport to capture. In one of his manuscript entitled: “Overthrow of the Copernican theory” Husserl emphasized the role of virtuality of natural laws such as it arises from Michelson’s experiment, dwelling on natural scientific naiveté. In fact, even though we eventually come to understand the earth as a thing moving among things, the unmoving earth remains the virtual condition that makes any movement intelligible. Thus, we might consider the actual world, each of its pieces and all determinations in them, as «intentional-real» objects of «virtual-conscious» acts. (shrink)

This article attempts to broaden the phenomenologically motivated perspective of H. Weyl's Das Kontinuum in the hope of elucidating the differences between the intuitive and mathematical continuum and further providing a deeper phenomenological interpretation. It is known that Weyl sought to develop an arithmetically based theory of continuum with the reasoning that one should be based on the naturally accessible domain of natural numbers and on the classical first-order predicate calculus to found a theory of mathematical continuum free of impredicative (...) circularities only to stumble, to cite a key question, in the evident lack of intuitive support for the notion of points of the continuum. In this motivation, I set out to deal from a Husserlian viewpoint with the general notion of points as appearances reducible to individuals of pre-predicative experience in contrast with the notion of an interval of real numbers taken as an abstraction based on the intuition of time-flowing experience. I argue that the notions of points and of real intervals in the above sense are not by essence related to objective temporality and thus their incompatibility in mathematical terms is ultimately due to deeper constituting reasons independently of any causal and spatio-temporal constraints. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs and critically analyzes Husserl’s philosophical engagement with symbolic technologies—those material artifacts and cultural devices that serve to aid, structure and guide processes of thinking. Identifying and exploring a range of tensions in Husserl’s conception of symbolic technologies, I argue that this conception is limited in several ways, and particularly with regard to the task of accounting for the more constructive role these technologies play in processes of meaning-constitution. At the same time, this paper shows that a critical (...) examination of Husserl’s account of symbolic technologies, particularly as developed in his mature, genetic phenomenology, can be enduringly fruitful—if some of the specific conceptual weakness of this account are identified and properly accounted for. My discussion will proceed as follows. In the first part I briefly analyze the early Husserl’s account of the role the ‘method of sensible signs’ plays in arithmetic cognition. In the second, main part I critically examine the bearing the genetic-phenomenological concepts of sedimentation and technization have on the conceptualization of symbolic technologies in Husserl’s work. In the final part I summarize the major strengths and weaknesses of Husserl’s account of symbolic technologies, and in the process make a case for the ongoing relevance of some of the crucial elements of this account. (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)

The paper examines Husserl’s interactions with logicians in the 1930s in order to assess Husserl’s awareness of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. While there is no mention about the results in Husserl’s known exchanges with Hilbert, Weyl, or Zermelo, the most likely source about them for Husserl is Felix Kaufmann (1895–1949). Husserl’s interactions with Kaufmann show that Husserl may have learned about the results from him, but not necessarily so. Ultimately Husserl’s reading marks on Friedrich Waismann’s Einführung in das mathematische Denken: die (...) Begriffsbildung der modernen Mathematik, 1936, show that he knew about them before his death in 1938. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Husserl's solution of the problem of imaginary elements in mathematics as presented in the drafts for two lectures hegave in Göttingen in 1901 and other related texts of the same period,a problem that had occupied Husserl since the beginning of 1890, whenhe was planning a never published sequel to Philosophie der Arithmetik(1891). In order to solve the problem of imaginary entities Husserl introduced,independently of Hilbert, two notions of completeness (definiteness in Husserl'sterminology) for a formal axiomatic (...) system. I present and discuss these notionshere, establishing also parallels between Husserl's and Hilbert's notions ofcompleteness. (shrink)

This essay argues against David Carr’s relativism by clarifying the in principle requirements appropriate to non-relative truths and showing that de facto differences of conceptual frameworks threaten none of them. Non-relative truths are not threatened by history. This defense of non-relative truth belongs to a larger defense of Husserlian “science” that shows how essences, even those “delivered” by history, have a universal “governance” and can be affirmed in nonrelative truths-as such science requires. If history also allows the other qualities of (...) Husserlian science to obtain, then, the essay concludes, such science can exist even as a “situated science.”. (shrink)

By tracing the general evolution of HusserI’s theory of logic and mathematics, this essay explores Husserl’s identification and strategic overcoming of the two forms of psychologism--Iogical psychologism and transcendental psychologism--that bar the way to rigorous phenomenological inquiry. In the early works “On the Concept of Number” and the Philosophie der Arithmetik Husserl himself falls victim to a particular form of logical psychologism. By the time of the Logical Investigations this problem has been dealt with: the method of eidetic intuition enables (...) an account of the “origins” of logical and mathematical concepts without reducing such concepts to mere predicates of mental acts. The task of Formal and Transcendental Logic is to disclose the more pervasive problem of transcendental psychologism, one that taints even the theory of pure logic articulated in the Logical Investigations. A radical solution is provided through the development of an “ultimate logic” of transcendental subjectivity. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft Jahrgang: 24 Heft: 2 Seiten: 213-220.

In the first year of the twentieth century, in Gottingen, Husserl delivered two talks dealing with a problem that proved central in his philosophical development, that of imaginary elements in mathematics. In order to solve this problem Husserl introduced a logical notion, called “definiteness”, and variants of it, that are somehow related, he claimed, to Hilbert’s notions of completeness. Many different interpretations of what precisely Husserl meant by this notion, and its relations with Hilbert’s ones, have been proposed, but no (...) consensus has been reached. In this paper I approach this question afresh and thoroughly, taking into consideration not only the relevant texts and context, as others have also done before, but, more importantly, Husserl’s philosophy, his intuition-based epistemology in particular. Based on a system of clearly defined concepts that I here present, I reinforce an interpretation—definiteness as a form of syntactic completeness—that has, I believe, some advantages vis-à-vis alternative interpretations. It is in conformity with the available texts; it makes clear that Husserl’s notion of definiteness is indeed close to Hilbert’s notions of completeness; it solves the important problem of imaginaries for which it was created; and last, but not least, it fits naturally into Husserl’s system of concepts and ideas. (shrink)

In the first year of the twentieth century, in Gottingen, Husserl delivered two talks dealing with a problem that proved central in his philosophical development, that of imaginary elements in mathematics. In order to solve this problem Husserl introduced a logical notion, called “definiteness”, and variants of it, that are somehow related, he claimed, to Hilbert’s notions of completeness. Many different interpretations of what precisely Husserl meant by this notion, and its relations with Hilbert’s ones, have been proposed, but no (...) consensus has been reached. In this paper I approach this question afresh and thoroughly, taking into consideration not only the relevant texts and context, as others have also done before, but, more importantly, Husserl’s philosophy, his intuition-based epistemology in particular. Based on a system of clearly defined concepts that I here present, I reinforce an interpretation—definiteness as a form of syntactic completeness—that has, I believe, some advantages vis-à-vis alternative interpretations. It is in conformity with the available texts; it makes clear that Husserl’s notion of definiteness is indeed close to Hilbert’s notions of completeness; it solves the important problem of imaginaries for which it was created; and last, but not least, it fits naturally into Husserl’s system of concepts and ideas. (shrink)

The paper traces the development and the role of syntactic reduction in Edmund Husserl’s early writings on mathematics and logic, especially on arithmetic. The notion has its origin in Hermann Hankel’s principle of permanence that Husserl set out to clarify. In Husserl’s early texts the emphasis of the reductions was meant to guarantee the consistency of the extended algorithm. Around the turn of the century Husserl uses the same idea in his conception of definiteness of what he calls “mathematical manifolds.” (...) The paper argues that the notion anticipates the notion of reduction in term rewrite theory in computer science. The role of the reduction for Husserl is, however, primarily epistemological: its purpose is to impart clarity to formal mathematics. (shrink)