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DagfinnFøllesdal, “Husserl's notion of Noema,” The Journal of Philosphy 66 (1969), pp. 680–687, reprinted in H.L. Dreyfus, ed., Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science (hereafter HICS), (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1984), pp. 73–80.
HereafterPA. Frege's “Review of Dr. E. Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic,” tr. by E.W. Kluge, in J.N.Mohanty, ed., Readings on Husserl's Logical Investigations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977) first appeared in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 103 (1894), pp. 313–332.
Reprinted in Frege, Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung: Fünf logische Studien (2nd ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1966), pp. 40–65, and translated as “Sense and Reference” by M. Black, The Philosophical Review 57 (1948), pp. 207–230. Translations of this paper have been widely reprinted, most importantly in Gottlob Frege, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. by P. Geach and M. Black (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966). I shall refer to the 1966 reprint of the German and to the Philosophical Review translation.
Cf. DagfinnFøllesdal, Husserl und Frege (Oslo: I. Kommisjon Hos H. Aschehoug and Co., 1958).
Dagfinn Føllesdal, “Husserl's Conversion from Psychologism and the Vorstellung-Meaning-Reference Distinction: Two Separate Issues”, HICS, pp. 52–56. Føllesdal's response is to J.N. Mohanty, “Husserl and Frege: A New Look at their Relationship”, which is reprinted in Mohanty, ed., Readings on Husserl's Logical Investigations and incorporated into the first chapter of Mohanty's book Husserl and Frege (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
Cf. Hubert L.Dreyfus, “The Perceptual Noema: Gurwitsch's Crucial Contribution,” L.Embree, ed., Life-World and Consciousness: Essays for Aron Gurwitsch (Evanston: North-western University Press, 1972), pp. 136, 139–240, and a revision thereof entitled “Husserl's Perceptual Noema”, which appears in HICS; cp. pp. 98, 99–100.
Cf. Robert C.Solomon, “Sense and Essence: Frege and Husserl,” in Solomon, ed., Phenomenology and Existentialism (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1972), pp. 259–261.
HerbertSpiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 19712), Vol. I, p. 93.
David WoodruffSmith and RonaldMcIntyre, Husserl and Intentionality: A Study of Mind, Meaning, and Language (Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: D. Reidel Publishing Co., cloth 1982, paper 1984).
David Woodruff Smith and Ronald McIntyre, “Intentionality via Intensions,” The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971), p. 541 f.
ibit., p. 561.
Cp. Richard Aquila's approval of this in his review of Mohanty's book, Husserl Studies 1 (1984), pp. 320–330.
This paper forms part of a larger project analyzing and criticizing both the historical and philosophical aspects of the Fregean interpretation of Husserl.
An English translation of the entire Logical Investigations is available as EdmundHusserl, Logical Investigations, tr. by J.N. Findlay (2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegal Paul; New York: The Humanities Press, 1970), cp. II, 562. Whenever an English translation of a cited work by Husserl is available, I shall include a reference to it in brackets after the reference to the German edition. If I have modified the published translation in any way, I shall so indicate by placing an “m” immediately following the page number of the translation.
Hua XVII, 90–91 [=Formal and Transcendental Logic, tr. by D. Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), pp. 86–87m].
Cp. Hua XIX/1, 12 f. [I, 47].
Cf. Dallas Willard, “Concerning Husserl's View of Number”, The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 5 (1974), p. 108 for references to other discussions of number in Husserl's work which continue to advance essentially the same position as that found in PA.
Dallas Willard “Concerning Husserl's View of Number”, p. 98 argues the first and Mohanty, Husserl and Frege, pp. 20–22, the second. Both, I think, are correct in these arguments as we limit our attention to Husserl's account of the genuine presentation of the lower cardinal numbers; cp. below.
Cp. Mohanty, Husserl and Frege, pp. 2–4.
This is Solomon's word; cp. “Sense and Essence”, p. 261.
Mohanty, Husserl and Frege, chaps. 1–2 argues to a similar conclusion by slightly different means, although I am greatly indebted to his arguments in what I have had to say. Føllesdal's response claims (HICS, pp. 53–54) that the fact of the Vorstellung-meaning-reference distinction does not indicate that Husserl did not have a non-psychologistic theory of meaning by 1891, presumably because this distinction would be compatible with a psychologistic theory of meaning, and therefore that Mohanty has not shown that falsity of Føllesdal's claim that Frege may have had a decisive influence. But Føllesdal, it seems to me, has missed the point in two respects. First, Husserl has distinguished the meaning from the presentation in precisely the sense of “presentation” which Frege uses in his criticism of psychology; hence, Husserl could not, in 1891, been guilty of the kind of psychologism for which Frege criticizes him. Mohanty makes precisely this rejoinder to Føllesdal in Husserl and Frege, p. 132, n. 45. Secondly, the issue is not so much whether Husserl had a non-psychologistic theory of meaning by 1891 as whether Husserl independently formulated the distinctions between the act, the meaning, and the object of a presentation. That Husserl made the necessary distinctions and developed them in a clearly non-psychologistic way independently of Frege has, I think, been established both by what Mohanty has argued and what I have said above.
Cp. the preface to PA, p. 8: “a part of the psychological investigations of the present volume were contained almost verbatim in my Habilitationschrift, from which in the autumn of 1887 a booklet of four signatures was printed under the title Über den Begriff der Zahl: Psychologische Analysen...”; and Edmund Husserl, “Persönliche Aufzeichnungen”, ed. by W. Biemel, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 16 (1956), p. 264. J.Philip Miller, Numbers in Presence and Absence: A Study of Husserl's Philosophy of Mathematics (The Hague, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), p. 26, n. 52, points out that Husserl says much the same in a letter to Meinong.
The essentials of Husserl's account of the genuine experience of cardinal numbers can be found in PA, esp. Chaps. 1–4 and the Habilitationschrift from 1887, which is reprinted as supplementary text A in Hua XII, 289–339. Accounts of Husserl's views therein can be found in Willard, “Concerning Husserl's View of Number”; Marvin Faber, The Foundation of Phenomenology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1968), Chap. 2; Robert Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserl's Concept of Constitution (hereafter Formation) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), Chap. I, § §2–5; and Miller, Numbers in Presence and Absence, esp. Chaps. II-III.
The mediation of the formation of the various number-concepts by the concept of group or multiplicity in general is a step dropped by Husserl in the transition from Über den Begriff der Zahl to PA; cp. PA, p. 81 to Über den Begriff der Zahl, Hua XII, pp. 334–337. It is no longer necessary to form the indeterminate concept of a plurality and then determine it as a number; instead the number-concepts can be formed directly on the basis of an experience of a determinate multiplicity; cp. Miller, Numbers in Presence and Absence, p. 40.
Willard, “Concerning Husserl's View of Number”, p. 106.
Hua XXI, 245; the letter dates probably from February of 1890.
I have discussed the reasons for the non-publication of the second volume of mathematical investigations in my review of Studien, Man and World 17 (1984), pp. 217–227. These reasons have little to do with psychologism, and even less to do with Frege's review of PA, as Føllesdal suggests they do; cp. his response to Mohanty, HICS, p. 54. Furthermore, Miller's suggestion (Numbers in Presence and Absence, pp. 19–23) that Husserl's rejection of psychologism is the rejection of the view of mathematical analysis as a technology of calculating with signs is inadequate. There is, in fact, nothing psychologistic in this view of logic and mathematics as technical sciences, unless one in addition says that the technology of calculation is grounded not in the concepts signified by the signs, but in psychology; this latter position, of course, Husserl rejects as an account of logic in the Prolegomena. The mathematical writings slated for publication characterize mathematics as a technology; they do not assert that this technology is grounded in psychology. And the attempt to view mathematical analysis as fundamentally a technology, as long as this technology retains its ideal, normative character, is not in and of itself psychologistic; it is merely, as Husserl quickly recognized, inadequate.
HICS, p. 55.
W.R. Boyce Gibson, “From Husserl to Heidegger: Excerpts from a 1928 Freiburg Diary by W.R. Boyce Gibson”, ed. by H. Spiegelberg, The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 2 (1971), p. 66.
KarlSchuhmann, Husserl-Chronik (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), p. 463.
Cp. Mohanty, Husserl and Frege, p. 48.
Ibid., p. 26.
Ibid., p. 26.
Cp. Willard, “Concerning Husserl's View of Number”, pp. 108–109.
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Drumond, J.J. Frege and Husserl: Another look at the issue of influence. Husserl Stud 2, 245–265 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00430969
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00430969