Abstract

Husserl’s refutation of psychologism one hundred years ago in his opus mag-num Logische Untersuchungen is a painfully detailed enterprise. After justi-fying the existence of logic as a separate practical discipline, Husserl first shows that normative and a fortiori practical disciplines are founded on theoretical ones. He then formulates the psychologistic theses, extracts empirical consequences from them and shows how psychologism distorts the content of logical laws. The nucleus of the refutation consists in six arguments showing that specific relativism and, in particu-lar, anthropologism is a form of skepticism, and, finally, establishing that psycholo-gism is a specific relativism, an anthropologism. A more direct and brief refutation follows, in which Husserl brings to the fore the prejudices on which psychologism is based