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)

This article locates Weyl''s philosophy of mathematics and its relationship to his philosophy of science within the epistemological and ontological framework of Husserl''s phenomenology as expressed in the Logical Investigations and Ideas. This interpretation permits a unified reading of Weyl''s scattered philosophical comments in The Continuum and Space-Time-Matter. But the article also indicates that Weyl employed Poincaré''s predicativist concerns to modify Husserl''s semantics and trim Husserl''s ontology. Using Poincaré''s razor to shave Husserl''s beard leads to limitations on the least upper (...) bound theorem in the foundations of analysis and Dirichlet''s principle in the foundations of physics. Finally, the article opens the possibility of reading Weyl as a systematic thinker, that he follows Husserl''s so-called transcendental turn in the Ideas. This permits an even more unified reading of Weyl''s scattered philosophical comments. (shrink)

What is the relationship between syntax and logic? Is the former autonomous and independent of the latter? If it is not, what kind of logic syntax interfaces with? These questions are not unheard of, having been around for quite some time, along with different answers. In the generative tradition, for example, logic cannot provide a model for linguistic behaviour. Conversely, according to the logicality of language hypothesis logical considerations are relevant to syntactic formation and explain the ungrammaticality of certain constructions. (...) This note offers a brief overview of the logicality of language hypothesis and proposes new evidence that seems to indicate that accepting the said hypothesis does not necessarily require assuming a “natural” logic. (shrink)

La reflexión sobre los números y las significaciones es una buena muestra de cómo la fenomenología incipiente se sitúa en el terreno de la lógica pura. El artículo plantea que, para trazar una reflexión que no rasgue la personalidad filosófica de Husserl, lo ideal debe entenderse desde la perspectiva de trabajos posteriores. El artículo intenta ofrecer, tras los análisis iniciales de los números y de las significaciones las tesis sobre la idealidad en Husserl que, en nuestra opinión, detectan los aspectos (...) fundamentales de la fenomenología a pesar del abandono posterior del realismo eidético. (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)

One of the central issues in linguistics is whether or not language should be considered a self-contained, autonomous formal system, essentially reducible to the syntactic algorithms of meaning construction (as Chomskyan grammar would have it), or a holistic-functional system serving the means of expressing pre-organized intentional contents and thus accessible with respect to features and structures pertaining to other cognitive subsystems or to human experience as such (as Cognitive Linguistics would have it). The latter claim depends critically on the existence (...) of principles governing the composition of semantic contents. Husserl''s fourth Logical Investigation is well known as a genuine precursor for Chomskyan grammar. However, I will establish the heterogeneous character of the Investigation and show that the whole first part of it is devoted to the exposition of a semantic combinatorial system cognate to the one elaborated within Cognitive Linguistics. I will thus show how theoretical results in linguistics may serve to corroborate and shed light on those parts of Husserl''s Fourth Investigation that have traditionally been dismissed as vague or simply ignored. (shrink)

Husserl’s Logical Grammar is intended to explain how complex expressions can be constructed out of simple ones so that their meaning turns out to be determined by the meanings of their constituent parts and the way they are put together. Meanings are thus understood as structured contents and classified into formal categories to the effect that the logical properties of expressions reflect their grammatical properties. As long as linguistic meaning reduces to the intentional content of pre-linguistic representations, however, it is (...) not trivial to account for how semantics relates to syntax in this context. In this paper, I analyze Husserl’s Logical Grammar as a system of recursive rules operating on representations and suggest that the syntactic form of representations contributes to their semantics because it carries information about semantic role. I further discuss Husserl’s syntactic account of the unity of propositions and argue that, on this account, logical form supervenes on syntactic form. In the last section I draw some implications for the phenomenology of thought and conjecture that the structural features it displays are likely to convey the syntactic structures of an underlying language-like representational system. (shrink)

Both through his own work and that of his students, Franz Clemens Brentano had an often underappreciated influence on the course of 20 th - and 21 st -century philosophy. _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ offers full coverage of Brentano’s philosophy and his influence. It contains 38 brand-new essays from an international team of experts that offer a comprehensive view of Brentano’s central research areas—philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and value theory—as well as of the principal (...) figures shaped by Brentano’s school of thought. A General Introduction serves as an overview of Brentano and the contents of the volume and three separate bibliographies point students and researchers on to further avenues of inquiry. Systematic and detailed, _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ provides readers with a valuable reference to Brentano’s work, and to his lasting importance in the history of philosophy and in contemporary debates. (shrink)