This paper offers a more comprehensive and accurate picture of Edmund Husserl’s semiotics. I not only clarify, as many have already done, Husserl’s theory of signs from the 1901 Logical Investigations, but also examine how he transforms that element of his philosophy in the 1913/14 Revisions to the Sixth Logical Investigation. Specifically, the paper examines the evolution of two central tenets of Husserl’s semiotics. I first look at how he modifies his classification of signs. I disclose why he revised his (...) 1901 distinction between indicators and expressions, instead claiming in 1913/14 that the divisions should be drawn between indicators, signals, and categorial signs. Second, I elucidate why Husserl overturned his conclusion from the Investigations, that signs execute their signitive operations in three steps, because he recognizes that categorial signs and their meant object are experienced all at once. By exploring the transformation of these two tenets of Husserl’s semiotics, we will see that he conceived of the First Investigation only as a starting or jumping off point for future analyses of signitive experience, rather than as his final account. This analysis will further reveal novel insights about Husserl’s understanding of intersubjectivity, passivity, and temporality. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to examine the meaning and value of the criticism that Stumpf address to Husserl's phenomenology in Ideas I. My presentation is divided into four parts: I briefly describe the relationship between Stumpf and the young Husserl during his stay in Halle (1886-1901); then I will comment Stumpf's remarks on the definition of Husserl's phenomenology as descriptive psychology in his Logical Investigations; in the third part, I examine Husserl's notice in section 86 of Ideas I (...) where he compares his own terminology to that of Stumpf; finally I comment on Stumpf's criticism of Husserl's phenomenology in his last book Erkenntnislehre. (shrink)

This paper accomplishes two tasks. First, I examine in detail Edmund Husserl’s earliest philosophy of surrogates, as it is found in his 1890 “On the Logic of Signs ”. I analyze his psychological and logical investigations of surrogates, where the former is concerned with explaining how these signs function and the latter with how they do so reliably. His differentiation of surrogates on the basis of their genetic origins and degrees of necessity is discussed. Second, the historical importance of this (...) text is disclosed by showing how Semiotic serves as both the inspiration for, and the foil to, Husserl’s 1901 First Logical Investigation. Husserl not only adopts the idea that linguistic signs can function via association, but also maintains that such signs can motivate me to execute one of two experiences. The key difference between the texts is that Husserl abandons his theory of surrogates in 1901, instead holding that I can experience absent objects by means of empty intentions. The reasons why Husserl found it necessary to transform this tenet of his philosophy are discussed at length. (shrink)

Husserlian Essentialism is the view, maintained byEdmundHusserl throughout his career, that necessary truths obtain because essentialist truths obtain. In this thesis I have two goals. First, to reconstruct and flesh out Husserlian Essentialism and its connections with surrounding areas of Husserl's philosophy in full detail – something which has not been done yet. Second, to assess the theoretical solidity of the view. As regards the second point, after having presented Husserlian Essentialism in the first two chapters, I raise a serious (...) problem for it in Chapter 3. In the remainder of the thesis I endeavour to solve the problem. In order to do so, I propose to amend both Husserl's theory of essence and his theory of predication. The bulk of the emendation consists in working out an account of essence and an account of predication that do not presuppose, or in any way imply, the claims that: 1) for a universal to be in the essence of an object, either the object or one of its parts must instantiate the universal; 2) for a universal to be truly predicated of an object, either the object or one of its parts must instantiate the universal. These claims, notice, apart from being what gets Husserl in trouble, are well entrenched not only in Husserl's, but in most theories of essence and predication. It is thus interesting to see what an alternative option may be – even regardless of the Husserlian setting in which I work it out. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to provide a unitary typology for the incompatibilities of meanings at stake on different levels of Husserlian pure logic—namely, between systems of axioms and pure morphology of meanings; I show that they perfectly match by converging on the notion of Widersinn.

Edmund Husserl is the founder of phenomenology and the Logical Investigations is his most famous work. It had a decisive impact on twentieth century philosophy and is one of few works to have influenced both continental and analytic philosophy. This is the first time both volumes have been available in paperback. They include a new introduction by Dermot Moran, placing the Investigations in historical context and bringing out their contemporary philosophical importance. These editions include a new preface by Sir Michael (...) Dummett. (shrink)

In his 1896 lecture course on logic–reportedly a blueprint for the Prolegomena to Pure Logic –Husserl develops an explicit account of logic as an independent and purely theoretical discipline. According to Husserl, such a theory is needed for the foundations of logic (in a more general sense) to avoid psychologism in logic. The present paper shows that Husserl’s conception of logic (in a strict sense) belongs to the algebra of logic tradition. Husserl’s conception is modeled after arithmetic, and respectively logical (...) inferences are viewed as analogical to arithmetical calculation. The paper ends with an examination of Husserl’s involvement with the key characters of the algebra of logic tradition. It is concluded that Ernst Schröder, but presumably also Hermann and Robert Grassmann influenced Husserl most in his turn away from psychologism. (shrink)

This volume aims to establish the starting point for the development, evaluation and appraisal of the phenomenology of mathematics.

Throughout his career, Husserl identifies naturalism as the greatest threat to both the sciences and philosophy. In this paper, I explicate Husserl’s overall diagnosis and critique of naturalism and then examine the specific transcendental aspect of his critique. Husserl agreed with the Neo-Kantians in rejecting naturalism. He has three major critiques of naturalism: First, it (like psychologism and for the same reasons) is ‘countersensical’ in that it denies the very ideal laws that it needs for its own justification. Second, naturalism (...) essentially misconstrues consciousness by treating it as a part of the world. Third, naturalism is the inevitable consequence of a certain rigidification of the ‘natural attitude’ into what Husserl calls the ‘naturalistic attitude’. This naturalistic attitude ‘reifies’ and it ‘absolutizes’ the world such that it is treated as taken-for-granted and ‘obvious’. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological analysis, however, discloses that the natural attitude is, despite its omnipresence in everyday life, not primary, but in fact is relative to the ‘absolute’ transcendental attitude. The mature Husserl’s critique of naturalism is therefore based on his acceptance of the absolute priority of the transcendental attitude . The paradox remains that we must start from and, in a sense, return to the natural attitude, while, at the same time, restricting this attitude through the on-going transcendental vigilance of the universal epoché. (shrink)

This volume contains an English translation of Edmund Husserl’s first major work, the Philosophie der Arithmetik, (Husserl 1891). As a translation of Husserliana XII (Husserl 1970), it also includes the first chapter of Husserl’s Habilitationsschrift (Über den Begriff der Zahl) (Husserl 1887) and various supplementary texts written between 1887 and 1901. This translation is the crowning achievement of Dallas Willard’s monumental research into Husserl’s early philosophy (Husserl 1984) and should be seen as a companion to volume V of the Husserliana: (...) Collected Works series (Husserl 1994b), which already contained selected translations from Hua XII. As Willard re- marks on the inner cover of the volume, it is “a window on a period of rich and illuminating philosophical activity”, to which I wholeheartedly agree. Willard’s two volumes of translations open this window on the beginnings of Husserl’s philosophy for the English-speaking world. This earliest period of Husserl’s philosophy has often been unjustly ignored and Willard provides the English reader with an excellent starting point. Husserl’s first steps into phenomenology and the philosophy of logic and mathematics contain many promising seeds that will flower later on, in the Logische Untersuchungen and beyond. (shrink)

Husserl left many unpublished drafts explaining (or trying to) his views on spatial representation and geometry, such as, particularly, those collected in the second part of Studien zur Arithmetik und Geometrie (Hua XXI), but no completely articulate work on the subject. In this paper, I put forward an interpretation of what those views might have been. Husserl, I claim, distinguished among different conceptions of space, the space of perception (constituted from sensorial data by intentionally motivated psychic functions), that of physical (...) geometry (or idealized perceptual space), the space of the mathematical science of physical nature (in which science, not only raw perception has a word) and the abstract spaces of mathematics (free creations of the mathematical mind), each of them with its peculiar geometrical structure. Perceptual space is proto-Euclidean and the space of physical geometry Euclidean, but mathematical physics, Husserl allowed, may find it convenient to represent physical space with a non-Euclidean structure. Mathematical spaces, on their turn, can be endowed, he thinks, with any geometry mathematicians may find interesting. Many other related questions are addressed here, in particular those concerning the a priori or a posteriori character of the many geometric features of perceptual space (bearing in mind that there are at least two different notions of a priori in Husserl, which we may call the conceptual and the transcendental a priori). I conclude with an overview of Weyl’s ideas on the matter, since his philosophical conceptions are often traceable back to his former master, Husserl. (shrink)

Dennett’s contrast between auto- and hetero-phenomenology is badly drawn, primarily because Dennett identifies phenomenologists as introspective psychologists. The contrast I draw between phenomenology and hetero-phenomenology is not in terms of the difference between a first-person, introspective perspective and a third-person perspective but rather in terms of the difference between two third-person accounts – a descriptive phenomenology and an explanatory psychology – both of which take the first-person perspective into account.

The characteristic feature of phenomenology is the phenomenological constraint it exerts on its concepts: they should be embodied in concrete cases. Now, one might take that that possible match between concepts and the given would require some ontological foundation: as if the general determination provided by the concept should correspond to a particular piece of given to be found in the object itself as an abstract ‘moment’. Phenomenology would then call for an ontology of abstract particulars. Against such view, the (...) author advocates that such ontological foundation is flawed in principle, and that phenomenology as such does not call for any particular ontology: phenomenology rather introduces some kind of phenomenological constraint on the very way of ontological analysis. In order to determine what one can say to be in particular circumstances, one has to consider what one usually says to be in that kind of circumstances: on this alternative view, ontology rests on examples, as paradigmatic applications of concepts. The phenomenological move consists in disclosing how the very content of concepts depends on the ways they are applied, rather than what would be supposed to ‘correspond’ to them would depend on their alleged content—as if the latter was independent of any previous connection with the given. (shrink)

Despite attending Husserl’s classes, participating in the discussions of the Göttingen phenomenological circle, and writing prolifically on phenomenology, Eugen Enyvvari seems to have been virtually ignored by phenomenological scholarship. I use an array of unpublished sources and a survey of his juvenilia to reconstruct Enyvvari’s biography and intellectual formation, including his confrontation with Melchior Palagyi’s critique of Husserl and Bolzano. Based on both his reports and records from the Göttingen University Archives, I attempt to establish the influences to which he (...) could have been exposed in Göttingen. I rely on a careful micro-analysis of the development of Husserl’s notion of noematical meaning at the time of Enyvvari’s stay in Göttingen in order to asses Enyvvari’s specific contribution to phenomenology and his significance from the point of view of the general historiography of phenomenology. (shrink)

Husserl left many unpublished drafts explaining (or trying to) his views on spatial representation and geometry, such as, particularly, those collected in the second part of Studien zur Arithmetik und Geometrie (Hua XXI), but no completely articulate work on the subject. In this paper, I put forward an interpretation of what those views might have been. Husserl, I claim, distinguished among different conceptions of space, the space of perception (constituted from sensorial data by intentionally motivated psychic functions), that of physical (...) geometry (or idealized perceptual space), the space of the mathematical science of physical nature (in which science, not only raw perception has a word) and the abstract spaces of mathematics (free creations of the mathematical mind), each of them with its peculiar geometrical structure. Perceptual space is proto-Euclidean and the space of physical geometry Euclidean, but mathematical physics, Husserl allowed, may find it convenient to represent physical space with a non-Euclidean structure. Mathematical spaces, on their turn, can be endowed, he thinks, with any geometry mathematicians may find interesting. Many other related questions are addressed here, in particular those concerning the a priori or a posteriori character of the many geometric features of perceptual space (bearing in mind that there are at least two different notions of a priori in Husserl, which we may call the conceptual and the transcendental a priori). I conclude with an overview of Weyl’s ideas on the matter, since his philosophical conceptions are often traceable back to his former master, Husserl. (shrink)

Few have entertained the idea that Georg Cantor, the creator of set theory, might have influenced Edmund Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement. Yet an exchange of ideas took place between them when Cantor was at the height of his creative powers and Husserl in the throes of an intellectual struggle during which his ideas were particularly malleable and changed considerably and definitively. Here their writings are examined to show how Husserl's and Cantor's ideas overlapped and crisscrossed in the (...) areas of philosophy and mathematics, arithmetization, abstraction, consciousness and pure logic, psychologism, metaphysical idealism, new numbers, and sets and manifolds. (shrink)

Both through his own work and that of his students, Franz Clemens Brentano had an often underappreciated influence on the course of 20 th - and 21 st -century philosophy. _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ offers full coverage of Brentano’s philosophy and his influence. It contains 38 brand-new essays from an international team of experts that offer a comprehensive view of Brentano’s central research areas—philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and value theory—as well as of the principal (...) figures shaped by Brentano’s school of thought. A General Introduction serves as an overview of Brentano and the contents of the volume and three separate bibliographies point students and researchers on to further avenues of inquiry. Systematic and detailed, _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ provides readers with a valuable reference to Brentano’s work, and to his lasting importance in the history of philosophy and in contemporary debates. (shrink)

Richard Tieszen [Tieszen, R. (2005). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LXX(1), 153–173.] has argued that the group-theoretical approach to modern geometry can be seen as a realization of Edmund Husserl’s view of eidetic intuition. In support of Tieszen’s claim, the present article discusses Husserl’s approach to geometry in 1886–1902. Husserl’s first detailed discussion of the concept of group and invariants under transformations takes place in his notes on Hilbert’s Memoir Ueber die Grundlagen der Geometrie that Hilbert wrote during the winter 1901–1902. (...) Husserl’s interest in the Memoir is a continuation of his long-standing concern about analytic geometry and in particular Riemann and Helmholtz’s approach to geometry. Husserl favored a non-metrical approach to geometry; thus the topological nature of Hilbert’s Memoir must have been intriguing to him. The task of phenomenology is to describe the givenness of this logos, hence Husserl needed to develop the notion of eidetic intuition. (shrink)

Clarifying the essential experiential structures at work in our everyday moral engagements promises both (1) to provide a perspicacious self-understanding, and (2) to significantly contribute to theoretical and practical matters of moral philosophy. Since the phenomenological enterprise is concerned with revealing the a priori structures of experience in general, it is then well positioned to discern the essential structures of moral experience specifically. Phenomenology can therefore significantly contribute to matters pertaining to moral philosophy. In this paper I would like to (...) contribute to the relatively small yet burgeoning field of phenomenological ethics. I endea­vour to do so by first identifying and consolidating the basic level of sense-bestowal, and then outlining the a priori structures of volition in order to demonstrate how such phenomenologically discerned structures are required for moral experience. Specifically, in section one I locate moral experience as at the level of meaning that is phenomenologically identified as the life-world, and then vindicate the life-world by illustrating how it is immune to naturalistic rationalisation. By thus both securing the level of meaning that is of concern and importantly delimiting the scope of our analysis, I proceed in section two to relate the volitional analyses of Aristotle, Husserl, and Heidegger. This relation is achieved thanks to a conceptual point of con­tinuity: ‘prohairesis’. By examining the function of this concept (as an intentional structure) and its phenomenological continuity, the ground is then prepared for further phenomenological analyses of the virtues. (shrink)

(2009). The Importance of Number in Husserl's Early Theory of Time-Constitution. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 40, Husserl's Lectures on Internal Time-Conciousness, pp. 188-206.

Evidence is the very core of Husserlian phenomenology, with the term “evidence” signifying for Husserl the phenomenological perspective on the question of truth. In contrast to the conventional philosophical understanding of “truth” in mainly epistemological terms, Husserl’s notion of “evidence”, as elaborated in his Logical Investigations (1900–1), is more essentially ontological, pointing to the way in which a phenomenon becomes clear to us in its constitution. Husserl’s main point in the Sixth Investigation was that we can “see” how evidence functions (...) when we compare something in the fullness of its presence with the emptiness of its absence. This paper considers the example Husserl offers of the room where the lights go off in order to illuminate the breakthrough for phenomenology achieved by Logical Investigations in its move beyond logic and epistemology to the primary level of pretheoretical experience as the reality of the real. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 2 August 2006. (shrink)

Anna-TeresaTymieniecka writes of a “dynamic skeleton for future fusions of sense” rising from the seemingly disjointed situation of philosophy and details how her phenomenology of life can put flesh on it. Examined here are her efforts to: uncover the deep-lying intelligibility of life by emphasizing the role of the logos of life in connection with meaning structures developed by Husserl; undertake a critique of phenomenological reason; delineate life’s path, not from cognition in isolation, but from within the fullness of human (...) functioning in all its complexity; give Husserl’s phenomenology a metaphysico-existential foundation; analyze the human creative process penetrating the very individualized meanderings of life; show how the creative logos reaches into communal/societal life and opens the way to spiritual and sacral horizons of experience. (shrink)