Abstract
Can we imagine the impact of the Logical Investigations on its first readers1 ? Although Husserl’s complex syntax continues the style of the German idealism, he deliberately turns his back on the prevailing philosophical trends of his own time. Husserl not only moves away from idealism, be it Kantian, post-Kantian or neo-Kantian; he at the same time takes leave of the vast current of psychologism from which he stemmed. The problems of logic cannot be solved by the exploration of the origin of the concepts in our souls, but only by giving prominence to the structure of concepts, which does not depend on their particular subjective occurrences. According to Husserl, this goal can be obtained by a new kind of intuition, which is directed towards essences, Wesensschau. Terminological and conceptual innovations of the Logical Investigations, such as “sense-giving act-character”, “fulfillment of acts by intuition”, “meaning-intentions”, “meaning-conferring acts” or “forming categorial acts” compounded the bewilderment of its readers.
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References
This paper has its origin in my unpublished research report for the C.N.R.S., Paris (1966) which, in its turn, grew out of a seminar of S. Bachelard at the Institut d’Histoire des Sciences, Université de Paris ( Sorbonne), in the sixties. I am greatly indebted to Claire Hill and to Paul Rusnock for their help in the revision of my text.
In 1884/5 Husserl attended Brentano’s lectures on the descriptive psychology of the continuum, where Bolzano’s Paradoxes of the Infinite was discussed. Brentano also spoke of ideas, intuitive and non-intuitive, clear and obscure, distinct and indistinct, etc.
Except God. Nevertheless, logical objects exist independently of God’s thoughts, logical relations bind even God.
Bolzano also uses the terms objective propositions and ideas (objektive Sätze, objektive Vorstellungen) as synonyms for propositions and ideas as such. Thoughts are subjective, propositions which are thought and ideas which are thought.
Bolzano 1810, II, § 8, transi. P. Rusnock.
Husserl 1970, II, Invest. V, § 44, 656.
when we say “the person who declares that 2+2=7”, we have an idea, although it contains a whole proposition.
The parts of an idea are not necessarily ideas of parts of its object
The parts of an idea are not necessarily ideas of the properties of its object.
Bussed 1977a (= Mohanty 1977), 36; engl. transi. by Dallas Willard (Husserl’s review appeared in 1903).
Spiegelberg 1960, 96, note 1, letter to Brentano, 27.3.1905.
Husserl 1939, § 9, 326, Husserl declares that `Bolzano’s theory of knowledge stands on the ground of an extreme empiricism“. A similar claim was made by David Stove in The Rationality of Induction (1986). At the Bolzano Workshop, Geneva, 29.9.2001–2.10.01, Anita Konzelmann showed that Stove’s criticism is not well founded.
Husserl 1976, Buch III, § 10, 57.
Husserl 1939, § 9, 326.
Rusnock 2000, 112–113.
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Sebestik, J. (2003). Husserl Reader of Bolzano. In: Husserl’s Logical Investigations Reconsidered. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0207-2_5
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