Abstract

It is a curious paradox that most of the original philosophers who were inspired by Husserl were realists, whereas Husserl himself was, or became, an idealist; an idealist, moreover, of a particularly extreme kind, closer, it would seem, to Fichte than to Kant. Such philosophers were not just phenomenologists who happened also to be realists; they found inspiration for their realism in Husserl’s phenomenology. Their realism, it is true, is closely bound up with their rejection of psychologism, a rejection inspired by Husserl’s critique of psychologistic accounts of logic in his Prolegomena to Pure Logic. But there is nothing particularly phenomenological about this critique. It consists mainly of arguments designed to show the absurdities and contradictions to which psychologism leads, arguments whose acceptance involves no particular commitment to phenomenology. The parts of Logical Investigations which are most significant in the development of a specifically phenomenological conception of philosophy are Investigations V and VI. These contain ideas which are likely to be congenial to a realist. These are the intentionality of consciousness; the rejection of representationalist accounts of perception; an account of the validity of the objective reference of modes of consciousness in terms of the notion of evidence.