Gelb–Goldstein’s Concept of “Concrete” and “Categorial” Attitude and the Phenomenology of Ideation

Abstract

Husserl’s theory of universals as general objects and specific ideal entities very soon acquired widespread notoriety, although often in a grossly misinterpreted and misrepresented form, partly as a result of the not very fortunately chosen term of “intuition of essences” (Wesenserschauung). When Husserl established his theory of ideation for the first time in the Logische Untersuchungen, he hardly went beyond asserting the specific nature and irreducibility of those acts through which universals in contradistinction to particular things are meant and apprehended and, correspondingly, asserting the specific nature and irreducibility of the objects apprehended through the acts in question. For this purpose, Husserl had to engage himself in a thoroughgoing analysis and discussion of the theories of abstraction prevailing in the tradition of classical British empiricism.