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 book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. Thus it is intended as a contribution to the history of philosophy. But I hope that it will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right as an attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have done so much (...) to demonstrate the continued fertility of the ideas and methods of the Austrian philosophers in our own day. For some time now, historians of philosophy have been gradually coming to terms with the idea that post-Kantian philosophy in the German-speaking world ought properly to be divided into two distinct traditions which we might refer to as the German and Austrian traditions, respectively. The main line of the first consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper. As should be clear, it is the Austrian tradition that has contributed most to the contemporary mainstream of philosophical thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world. For while there are of course German thinkers who have made crucial contributions to the development of exact or analytic philosophy, such thinkers were outsiders when seen from the perspective of native German philosophical culture, and in fact a number of them found their philosophical home precisely in Vienna. When, in contrast, we examine the influence of the Austrian line, we encounter a whole series of familiar and unfamiliar links to the characteristic concerns of more recent philosophy of the analytic sort. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the newly fashionable habit of referring to analytic philosophy as "Anglo-American" is in this light a "grave historical distortion". If, he says, we take into account the historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy "could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian" (1988, p. 7). Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle. The central axis of Austrian philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood. Work on Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken out of context. Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian philosophers in general were exercised -- in spite of the fact that many of these same problems have once more become important as a result of the contemporary burgeoning of interest on the part of philosophers in problems in the field of cognitive science. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Logical and Mathematical Background Intuitive versus Abstract Knowledge Logical Intuition and Abstract Reasoning Intuitive and Abstract Knowledge of Mathematics Principium Individuationis, Physics and Idealist Metaphysics of Space and Time Schopenhauer's Philosophical Geometry Intuitive Reduction of Arithmetic to Counting in Time Notes References Further Reading.

Cantor’s abstractionist account of cardinal numbers has been criticized by Frege as a psychological theory of numbers which leads to contradiction. The aim of the paper is to meet these objections by proposing a reassessment of Cantor’s proposal based upon the set theoretic framework of Bourbaki—called BK—which is a First-order set theory extended with Hilbert’s \-operator. Moreover, it is argued that the BK system and the \-operator provide a faithful reconstruction of Cantor’s insights on cardinal numbers. I will introduce first (...) the axiomatic setting of BK and the definition of cardinal numbers by means of the \-operator. Then, after presenting Cantor’s abstractionist theory, I will point out two assumptions concerning the definition of cardinal numbers that are deeply rooted in Cantor’s work. I will claim that these assumptions are supported as well by the BK definition of cardinal numbers, which will be compared to those of Zermelo–von Neumann and Frege–Russell. On the basis of these similarities, I will make use of the BK framework in meeting Frege’s objections to Cantor’s proposal. A key ingredient in the defence of Cantorian abstraction will be played by the role of representative sets, which are arbitrarily denoted by the \-operator in the BK definition of cardinal numbers. (shrink)

This paper explores a pair of puzzling and controversial topics in the history of late nineteenth-century philosophy: the psychologism debates, and the nature of neo-Kantianism. Each is sufficientl...

Besides presenting a phenomenological-experimental analysis of consciousness, Meinong challenged one of the major indisputable axioms of current scientific research, i.e. that perception in awareness has to be veridical on the stimulus. Meinong’s analysis of consciousness, which he conducted through a kind of dissection of its structures from a systematic and an experimental viewpoint, offers relevant insights to contemporary consciousness studies.

The issues surrounding the Caesar problem are assumed to be inert as far as ongoing mathematics is concerned. This paper aims to correct this impression by spelling out the ways that, in their historical context, Frege's remarks would have had considerable resonance with work that other mathematicians such as Riemann and Dedekind were doing. The search for presentation‐independent characterizations of objects and global definitions was seen as bound up with fundamental methodological questions in complex analysis and number theory.

Zermelos Zeit in Göttingen (1897?1910) kann als wissenschaftlich fruchtbarste Periode in seiner Karriere angesehen werden. Gleichwohl stehen bisher Untersuchungen aus. die eine Einbettung von Zermelos Werk in den biographischen und sozialen Kontext ermöglichen Die vorliegende Studie will diese Lücke unter Konzentration auf zwei Gegenstandsbereiche teileweise ausfüllen: (1) den historischen Entstehungskontext von Zermelos ersten Arbeiten über die Grundlagen der Mengenlehre; (2) die Vorgeschichte und näheren Umstände des 1907 an Zermelo verliehenen Lehrauftrages für mathematische Logik und verwandte Gegenstände. mit dem ein erster (...) Schritt zur Institutionalisierung dieses Faches als mathematischer Teildisziplin gemacht wurde. Beides wird in enger Verbindung zur ersten Phase des Hilbertschen Programms zur Grundlegung der Mathematik gesehen. Es wird aber auch gezeigt, daß für die Erteilung des Lehrauftrages neben diesen systematischen und forschungspolitischen Motiven auch persönliche und institutspolitische Rücksichten ausschlaggebend waren. Im Anhang werden Teile eines Briefwechsels zwischen Ernst Zermelo und dem Göttinger Philosophen Leonard Nelson ediert sowie die Anträge der Direktoren des Göttinger mathematisch-physikalischen Seminars auf Erteilung des Lehrauftrags und auf Ernennung Zermelos zum außerordentlichen Professor. Zermelo's Göttingen period (1897?1910) can be regarded as the most fruitful period in his scientific career. Nevertheless, up till now there have been no investigations which enable us to embed his work in its biographical and social contexts. This study tries to partially fill the gap, concentrating on two major themes: (I) the historical context of the development of Zermelo's early work on the foundations of set theory; (2) the prehistory and particulars of his lectureship for mathematical logic and related topics, this lectureship, which he was awarded in 1907, being the first step taken in Germany towards the establishment of this subject as a separate mathematical discipline. Both will be seen in close connection with the first phase of Hilbert's programme of founding mathematics. It is shown, however, that this lectureship was not only created to further the aims of Hilbert's research programme but that personal and institutional motives also played a role. In the appendices, parts of a correspondence between Ernst Zermelo and the Göttingen Philosopher Leonard Nelson are edited, as well as the applications of the directors of the Göttingen Mathematisch-physikalisches Seminar for awarding the lectureship to Zermelo in 1907, and for appointing Zermelo to an extraordinary professorship in 1910. (shrink)