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

This paper argues that Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophy attempts to reopen the question of human transcendence in contemporary terms. While his conception of language as self-transcending is deeply Husserlian, Ricoeur also responds to the analytical challenge when he deploys a basic distinction in Fregean logic in order to clarify Heidegger’s phenomenology of world. Ricoeur’s commitment to a transcendental view is evident in his conception of narrative, which enables him to emphasize the role of the performative in literary reading. The meaning (...) of the self in time provides Ricoeur with a discursive basis for distinguishing his own position from that of Kant and other philosophers in the transcendental tradition. (shrink)

A comprehensive and agreed-upon account of Husserl’s relation to Gottlob Frege does not yet exist. In this situation we encounter interpretations that allow systematic dogmas to reappear that should have long been vanquished—for instance, that the author of the Logical Investigations was not only decisively influenced by Frege, but also that he had already retracted his sharpest Frege-critique by 1891. The present essay contains a largely historical response to W. Künne’s new monograph on Frege that advocates such views. We will (...) concentrate on a small remark that turns out to reference a defining moment for any understanding of Husserl’s early philosophy. We shall argue that Husserl’s supposed self-criticism does not turn on the critique that he had earlier leveled at Frege’s Grundlagen der Arithmetik; rather, it has to do exclusively with his own earlier systematic positions on the grounding of arithmetic. In this context, an important particular of Husserl’s Philosophie der Arithmetik takes center stage: this book is a mosaic composed from old and new insights, a fact that becomes most evident in the two distinct concepts of “equivalence” that are founded there, which reflects Husserl’s transition from a theory of arithmetic based on the concept of number to one based on the parallelism between proper and symbolic (improper) presentations. This change involves a long historical development that goes back to a tradition marked by the work of Bolzano, Lotze, Brentano, and Stumpf, and it is closely tied to the problem of how to distinguish between the sense and the object of an act. Systematic neglect of the historical background of the Frege–Husserl relation has led to disputes over who owns the copyright to the sense/reference distinction, but it has obscured the very core of the original line of questioning. (shrink)

Eine vollständige Darstellung von Edmund Husserls Verhältnis zu Gottlob Frege steht noch aus, so dass es nicht verwundert, einige Missverständnisse, dieses Verhältnis betreffend, im Umlauf zu finden. Selbst scheinbar längst überwundene systematische Dogmen tauchen wieder auf, so z.B. die Auffassung, dass Husserl nicht nur entscheidend von Gottlob Frege beeinflusst wurde, sondern darüber hinaus auch seine schärfste Frege-Kritik 1891 zurückgenommen habe. Mein Beitrag enthält eine überwiegend historisch vorgehende Entgegnung auf solche fälschlich vertretenen Ansichten wie sie sich auch in dem neu erschienenen (...) und mit vielen dokumentarischen Belegen versehenen Frege-Kommentarbuch von W. Künne finden. Die wichtigsten Argumente, die in diesem Buch gegen Husserl gerichtet werden, stützen sich auf Stellen in Husserls Frühwerk, die zwar sehr aufschlussreich für die Beurteilung des philosophischen und menschlichen Habitus Husserls in den 1890er Jahre sind, nicht aber Künnes Thesen stützen oder gar beweisen können. Die als zurückgenommene Frege-Kritik verstandene Selbstkritik Husserls betrifft jedoch nach meinen Darlegungen gerade nicht die Kritik, die er an Freges Buch Grundlagen der Arithmetik geübt hatte, sondern seine eigene systematische Stellungnahme hinsichtlich der Begründung der Arithmetik. Ausgehend von dieser Einsicht werde ich auf ein wichtiges Spezifikum von Husserls Erstlingswerk (Philosophie der Arithmetik) aufmerksam machen, das voreiligen Interpretationen einen Riegel vorschiebt: Dieses Buch ist ein Mosaik aus Einsichten verschiedener Arbeits- und Denkperioden des Verfassers, die sich vor allem auch in dem zweifachen Begriff der Äquivalenz zeigen. Dies knüpft an einen langen geschichtlichen Entwicklungsprozess an, der in eine von Bolzano, Lotze, Brentano und Carl Stumpf geprägte Tradition zurückführt und das Problem der Unterscheidung zwischen Sinn und Gegenstand eines Aktes betrifft. (shrink)

In 1909 A. Koyré (1892–1964) came to Göttingen as an exile and there became a student of Edmund Husserl and other philosophers (A. Reinach, M. Scheler): already before leaving his country Russia Koyré read Husserl'sLogical Investigations, a text which interested greatly Russian philosophers and was translated into Russian in the same year. As many other contemporary philosophers, in Göttingen they were discussing on the fundaments of mathematic, Cantor's set theory and Russell's antinomies. On this problems Koyré wrote a long paper (...) inspired to Husserl'sLogical Investigations, read it in the Philosophical Society at Göttingen and submitted it as draft for his Ph.D. dissertation to Prof. Husserl, who refused it. So unhappily the celebrated methodologist and historian of science began his academical career: Koyré came back to write on logical and mathematical paradoxes in 1922 and in 1946–47 saying he was “going back to his first love”. Among other factors this deep interest in mathematic and exact sciences unabled Koyré to analyze Galileo and Newton in his masterly way. (shrink)

This paper examines two arguments againstpsychologism advanced by Frege andHusserl. The first argument says that thelaws of logic cannot be justified by thelaws of psychology, because the formerand a priori and certain, but the latterare probable only. The second argumentpoints out that the status of logicallaws as universal principles of thinking isnot intelligible on the psychologisticinterpretation of logic. The author tries toshow how to examine both arguments bymetalogical devices.

The history of what the title of Baghramian and Marchetti’s book refers to as the ‘Great Divide’ between Analytic and Continental philosophy has been the subject of much debate and controversy in r...

Since the pioneering work by Kripke and Montague, the term possible world has appeared in most theories of formal semantics for modal logics, natural languages, and knowledge-based systems. Yet that term obscures many questions about the relationships between the real world, various models of the world, and descriptions of those models in either formal languages or natural languages. Each step in that progression is an abstraction from the overwhelming complexity of the world. At the end, nothing is left but a (...) colorful metaphor for an undefined element of a set W called worlds, which are related by an undefined and undefinable primitive relation R called accessibility. For some purposes, the resulting abstraction has proved to be useful, but as a general theory of meaning, the abstraction omits too many significant features. So much information has been lost at each step that many philosophers, linguists, and psychologists have dismissed model-theoretic semantics as irrelevant to the study of meaning. This article examines the steps in the process of extractingthe pair (W,R) from the world and the way people talk about the world. It shows that the Kripke worlds can be reinterpreted as part of a Peircean semiotic theory, which can also include contributions from many other studies in cognitive science. Among them are Dunn’s semantics based on laws and facts, the lexical semantics preferred by manylinguists, psychological models of how the world is perceived, and philosophies of science that relate theories to the world. A full integration of all those sources is far beyond the scope of this article, but an outline of the approach suggests that Peirce’s vision is capable of relating and reconciling the competing sources. (shrink)

The article seeks to challenge the standard accounts of how to view the difference between Husserl and Frege on the nature of ideal objects and meanings. It does so partly by using Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Husserl to open up a critical space where the two approaches can be confronted in a new way. Frege’s criticism of Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics (that it was essentially psychologistic) was partly overcome by the program of transcendental phenomenology. But the original challenge to the (...) prospect of a fulfilled intuition of idealities remained and was in fact encountered again from within the transcendental analysis by Husserl himself in his last writings on geometry and language. According to the two standard and conflicting accounts, Husserl either changed his earlier psychologistic program as a result of Frege’s criticism, or he was in fact never challenged by it in the first place. The article shows instead how Husserl continued to struggle with the problem of the constitution of ideal objects, and how his quest led him to a point where his analyses anticipate a more dialectical and deconstructive conclusion, eventually made explicit by Derrida. It also shows not only how this development constitutes a philosophical continuity from the original dispute with Frege, but also how Frege’s critique in a certain respect could be read as an anticipation of Derrida’s deconstructive elaboration of Husserl’s phenomenology. (shrink)

Resumen En este trabajo analizo la crítica del psicologismo en las Investigaciones lógicas de Husserl. Para una reconstrucción adecuada del enfoque de este autor, vinculo las ideas centrales de su argumentación contra el psicologismo que se encuentran en el primer volumen con algunos análisis y tesis que introduce en el segundo volumen. Si bien no se presentan de manera explícita como críticas del psicologismo, estos análisis y tesis implican contribuciones para la superación de un enfoque empirista radical, vinculado en forma (...) estrecha con el subjetivismo y el psicologismo. Pongo atención especial en la crítica de las teorías de la abstracción en la Investigación Segunda, cuya vinculación con la crítica del psicologismo no suele reconocerse lo suficiente. También analizo el concepto de posibilidad ideal, fundamental para la comprensión del concepto husserliano de especie.In this paper I analyse the critique of psychologism advanced by Husserl in his Logical Investigations. In order to adequately rebuild the author's approach, I will link the central points of the argument against psychologism developed in the first volume with some analyses and theses introduced by Husserl in the second volume. These analyses and theses, although not explicitly presented as criticisms of psychologism, are clear contributions to overcoming a radical empiricist approach, closely linked to subjectivism and psychologism. I pay special attention to the critique of the theories of abstraction carried out in the Second Investigation, whose link with the critique of psychologism is not properly recognized. I also analyze the concept of ideal possibility, which is fundamental for the understanding of the Husserlian concept of species. (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)

Husserl's mathematical philosophy of science can be considered an anticipation of the contemporary postpositivistic semantic approach, which regards mathematics and not logic as the appropriate tool for the exact philosophical reconstruction of scientific theories. According to Husserl, an essential part of a theory's reconstruction is the mathematical description of its domain, that is, the world (or the part of the world) the theory intends to talk about. Contrary to the traditional micrological approach favored by the members of the Vienna Circle, (...) Husserl, inspired by modern geometry and set theory, aims at a macrological analysis of scientific theories that takes into account the global structures of theories as structured wholes. This is set in the complementary theories of manifolds and theory forms considered by Husserl himself as the culmination of his formal theory of science. (shrink)

One of the key concepts of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is the noema. Husserl uses the concept to denote the aspect of what is intended in experience as it remains within the transcendental domain of inquiry after the phenomenological reduction. Despite such seeming simplicity, Husserl’s discussion of the noema is ambiguous to the extent that it has sparked a wide-ranging debate in the secondary literature. The gist of the dispute concerns the question about the relation between the noema and the (...) object: whether the noema is content, ontologically distinct from the object, or the object itself just considered differently in philosophical reflection. In this paper, I propose an interpretation that aims to reconcile two opposing positions of this debate (the so-called West and East Coast interpretations). The impetus for the reconciliation stems from the fact that both interpretations seem to be correct while they also suffer from their own shortcomings. I propose the reconciliation by applying a distinction Husserl makes between two areas of phenomenological investigation, neutralized pure phenomenology and non-neutralized phenomenology of reason. Having clarified the distinction between them, I suggest that both competing interpretations can be partially correct when reserved for the aspect of the noema in either of the two areas of phenomenological investigation. Finally, I show how this proposal could aid in resolving issues in the recent discussion concerning Husserl’s noema and the internalism–externalism debate in philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Husserl argues in the Crisis that the prevalent tradition of positive science in his time had a philosophical core, called by him "Galilean science", that mistook the quest for objective theory with the quest for truth. Husserl is here referring to Gottingen science of the Golden Years. For Husserl, theory "grows" out of the "soil" of the prescientific, that is, pretheoretical, life-world. Scientific truth finally is to be sought not in theory but rather in the pragmatic-perceptual praxes of measurement. Husserl (...) is faulted for taking measuring processes to be "infinitely perfectible". The dependence of new scientific phenomena on the existence of prior "prescientific" inductive praxis is analyzed, also Husserl's residual objectivism and failure to appreciate the hermeneutic character of measurement. Though not a scientific (theory-)realist, neither was he an instrumentalist, but he was a scientific (phenomena-)realist. (shrink)

One major difficulty confronting attempts to clarify the epistemological and ontological status of abstract objects is determining the sense, if any, in which such entities may be characterised as mind and language independent. Our contention is that the tolerant reductionist position of Michael Dummett can be strengthened by drawing on Husserl's mature account of the constitution of ideal objects and mathematical objectivity. According to the Husserlian position we advocate, abstract singular terms pick out weakly mind-independent sedimented meaning-contents. These meaning-contents serve (...) as the ‘thin’ referents of abstract singular terms, but are ultimately founded in prior acts of meaning-constitution. (shrink)

This paper explores the emergence of the distinctions between the transcendental and the psychological and, correlatively, between phenomenology and psychology that emerge in The Idea of Phenomenology. It is argued that this first attempt to draw these distinctions reveals that the conception of transcendental phenomenology remains infected by elements of the earlier conception of descriptive psychology and that only later does Husserl move to a more adequate—but perhaps not yet fully purified—conception of the transcendental.

Dennett’s contrast between auto- and hetero-phenomenology is badly drawn, primarily because Dennett identifies phenomenologists as introspective psychologists. The contrast I draw between phenomenology and hetero-phenomenology is not in terms of the difference between a first-person, introspective perspective and a third-person perspective but rather in terms of the difference between two third-person accounts – a descriptive phenomenology and an explanatory psychology – both of which take the first-person perspective into account.

The aim of this paper is to establish a phenomenological mathematical intuitionism that is based on fundamental phenomenological-epistemological principles. According to this intuitionism, mathematical intuitions are sui generis mental states, namely experiences that exhibit a distinctive phenomenal character. The focus is on two questions: what does it mean to undergo a mathematical intuition and what role do mathematical intuitions play in mathematical reasoning? While I crucially draw on Husserlian principles and adopt ideas we find in phenomenologically minded mathematicians such as (...) Hermann Weyl and Kurt Gödel, the overall objective is systematic in nature: to offer a plausible approach towards mathematics. (shrink)

Published in 1891, Edmund Husserl's first book, Philosophie der Arithmetik, aimed to ‘prepare the scientific foundations for a future construction of that discipline’. His goals should seem reasonable to contemporary philosophers of mathematics: "…through patient investigation of details, to seek foundations, and to test noteworthy theories through painstaking criticism, separating the correct from the erroneous, in order, thus informed, to set in their place new ones which are, if possible, more adequately secured. 1"But the ensuing strategy for grounding mathematical knowledge (...) sounds strange to the modern ear. For Husserl cast his work as a sequence of ‘psychological and logical investigations’, providing a psychological analysis "…of the concepts multiplicity, unity, and number, insofar as they are given to use authentically and not through indirect symbolizations. "This emphasis on psychology is a reflection of Husserl's training. As a teenager studying in Leipzig, he attended the lectures of Wilhelm Wundt, a seminal figure in the field of experimental psychology. Wundt held that, via introspection, we can study and classify our inner experiences, in much the same way that scientists study the natural world. 2 People working in his laboratory were therefore trained in procedures for observing and reporting on their own thought processes, as a means of gathering scientific data regarding our cognitive faculties. Bridging the gap between psychology and epistemology, Wundt felt that the results of such inquiry could have normative consequences, since the principles of reasoning employed in the sciences not only have their origins in psychological processes, but, moreover, are justified by the fundamental role they play in thought. His two-volume work, Logik , thus combined empirical considerations with a Kantian emphasis on the way that knowledge depends on our cognitive faculties. 3In The Philosophy of …. (shrink)

There is a strong consensus among analytic philosophers that Husserl is an internalist and that his internalism must be understood in conjunction with his methodological solipsism. This paper focuses on Husserl's early work the, Logical Investigations , and explores whether such a reading is justified. It shows that Husserl is not a methodological solipsist: He neither believes that meaning can be reduced to the individual, nor does he assign an explanatory role for meaning to the subject. Explanatory priority is assigned (...) to objects which have an intrinsic property independently of any access or attitude we may have to them. Although not a methodological solipsist, there are nonetheless internalist elements to Husserl's thought: He believes that we can think of non-existent objects and his account of indexicals and demonstratives shows that there are two kinds of meaning: one is context independent and internally individuated, the other is partly determined by context and so externally individuated. The paper leaves it open whether this is sufficient to mark Husserl out as an internalist. However, even if he were considered as such, we can be sure of one thing, namely, that his internalism would not be a species of methodological solipsism. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl is the founder of phenomenology and the Logical Investigations is his most famous work. It had a decisive impact on twentieth century philosophy and is one of few works to have influenced both continental and analytic philosophy. This is the first time both volumes have been available in paperback. They include a new introduction by Dermot Moran, placing the Investigations in historical context and bringing out their contemporary philosophical importance. These editions include a new preface by Sir Michael (...) Dummett. (shrink)

This volume aims to establish the starting point for the development, evaluation and appraisal of the phenomenology of mathematics.

Husserl’s philosophy, by the usual account, evolved through three stages: 1. development of an anti-psychologistic, objective foundation of logic and mathematics, rooted in Brentanian descriptive psychology; 2. development of a new discipline of "phenomenology" founded on a metaphysical position dubbed "transcendental idealism"; transformation of phenomenology from a form of methodological solipsism into a phenomenology of intersubjectivity and ultimately (in his Crisis of 1936) into an ontology of the life-world, embracing the social worlds of culture and history. We show that this (...) story of three revolutions can provide at best a preliminary orientation, and that Husserl was constantly expanding and revising his philosophical system, integrating views in phenomenology, ontology, epistemology and logic with views on the nature and tasks of philosophy and science as well as on the nature of culture and the world in ways that reveal more common elements than violent shifts of direction. We argue further that Husserl is a seminal figure in the evolution from traditional philosophy to the characteristic philosophical concerns of the late twentieth century: concerns with representation and intentionality and with problems at the borderlines of the philosophy of mind, ontology, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Both Millikan’s brand of naturalistic analytic philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology have held on to teleological notions, despite their being out of favor in mainstream Western philosophy for most of the twentieth century. Both traditions have recognized the need for teleology in order to adequately account for intentionality, the need to adequately account for intentionality in order to adequately account for meaning, and the need for an adequate theory of meaning in order to precisely and consistently describe the world and life. (...) The stark differences between their accounts of these fundamental concepts stem from radically different conceptions of the world, the natural and life. I argue that Millikan’s teleosemantic approach relies on a teleology of determination by means of the lawfulness of nature that leaves no room for the freedom of self-determination, for reason, or for experience—for the reality of lived human life. In contrast to Millikan’s account, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology situates teleology as a function of reason and first-personal experience, part of an extended account of intentionality and meaning according to which the full range of our making sense of the world is conceived as a rational activity that is itself a part of that world, and not an unnatural activity to be separated from it. While Husserl’s account of these issues is indeed symptomatic of what Millikan calls “meaning rationalism,” I argue that it is immune to the sorts of problems she claims will plague any such account, since these problems arise only against the background of a set of presuppositions about intentionality that Husserl does not share. Husserl’s position can itself be understood to be within the bounds of a suitably liberal conception of naturalism, and interpreting him in this way it has the added benefit—contra Millikan—of not divorcing teleology from reason, the latter construed as our first-personal striving to make sense of the world as we experience it—of life. (shrink)

I argue for the Wittgensteinian thesis that mathematical statements are expressions of norms, rather than descriptions of the world. An expression of a norm is a statement like a promise or a New Year's resolution, which says that someone is committed or entitled to a certain line of action. A expression of a norm is not a mere description of a regularity of human behavior, nor is it merely a descriptive statement which happens to entail a norms. The view can (...) be thought of as a sort of logicism for the logical expressivist---a person who believes that the purpose of logical language is to make explicit commitments and entitlements that are implicit in ordinary practice. The thesis that mathematical statements are expression of norms is a kind of logicism, not because it says that mathematics can be reduced to logic, but because it says that mathematical statements play the same role as logical statements. ;I contrast my position with two sets of views, an empiricist view, which says that mathematical knowledge is acquired and justified through experience, and a cluster of nativist and apriorist views, which say that mathematical knowledge is either hardwired into the human brain, or justified a priori, or both. To develop the empiricist view, I look at the work of Kitcher and Mill, arguing that although their ideas can withstand the criticisms brought against empiricism by Frege and others, they cannot reply to a version of the critique brought by Wittgenstein in the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. To develop the nativist and apriorist views, I look at the work of contemporary developmental psychologists, like Gelman and Gallistel and Karen Wynn, as well as the work of philosophers who advocate the existence of a mathematical intuition, such as Kant, Husserl, and Parsons. After clarifying the definitions of "innate" and "a priori," I argue that the mechanisms proposed by the nativists cannot bring knowledge, and the existence of the mechanisms proposed by the apriorists is not supported by the arguments they give. (shrink)