This article introduces the first English translation of one of Tanabe’s early essays on metaphysics. It questions the relation of the universal to the particular in context of logic, phenomenology, Neo-Kantian epistemology, and classical metaphysics. Tanabe provides his reflections on the nature of the concept of universality and its constitutive relation to phenomenal particulars through critical analyses of the issue as it is discussed across various schools of philosophy including: British Empiricism, the Marburg School, the Austrian School, the Kyoto School, (...) and Platonism. In this essay, Tanabe reveals his ability to think metaphysically the ground for the possibility of reasoning and dares to voice his own thought beyond references to the most prominent thinkers of his time from distinct intellectual traditions in both the east and the west. This essay, therefore, demonstrates that his strong tendency to move beyond the received epistemology and phenomenology of the European intellectual tradition to metaphysics was already present in the early days of his academic life and thereby marks a more general contribution of the Kyoto School of Philosophy to distinct European schools of thought in the early twentieth century. (shrink)

Abstract.The author gives a short survey of the different methods which have been proposed to deal with the logic of norm sentences on the basis of logical systems of descriptive language: deontic logic, logic of norms as an isomorphism of propositional logic, restriction of logical relations to the propositional content of norm sentences, transformation of norms into sanction sentences, preference interpretation of norm sentences, double interpretation of ought‐sentences and the use of the descriptive interpretation as a tool for establishing the (...) logic of norms, proposition about norms in the place of normative logic, the logic of admissible worlds, postulates addressed to the rational lawgiver and technical ought as a substitute for nor‐mological considerations. A critical analysis of these attempts may prove them inappropriate, but it is not sufficient to prove the impossibility of any method of founding normative logic on systems of a descriptive language. Therefore the author adds a general consideration on the chances of such approaches. (shrink)

La théorie du jugement était une des préoccupations de Husserl depuis la toute première période de sa carrière. Ses premières recherches dans ce domaine se trouvent dans deux manuscrits rédigés en 1893 et 1893-1894 et publiés dans le volume XL des Husserliana . Dans cet article, j’examinerai la théorie du jugement dans ces manuscrits en relation aux questions suivantes : 1) les jugements en relation aux représentations ; 2) les assomptions comme des actes qui se déroulent parallèlement aux jugements ; (...) 3) les jugements impropres en tant que distincts des jugements propres ; 4) les jugements objectifs ; 5) les états de choses en tant que corrélatifs des actes de juger. Nous verrons que, tandis que Husserl se libère à maints égards de la théorie du jugement de Brentano qu’il avait apprise à Vienne puis à Halle, ses positions sont en même temps tout à fait représentatives de la phénoménologie autrichienne dans la mesure où elles impliquent à la fois une psychologie descriptive et une théorie de l’objet, bien que sans aucune prétention d’établir une nouvelle méthode en philosophie.The theory of judgment was one of Husserl’s concerns from a very early period of his career onward. His early investigations in this area are to be found in two manuscripts which he wrote in 1893 and 1893/94, which have been published as Text Nr. 1 and Text Nr. 2 of Husserliana XL. In this paper I examine the theory of judgment in these manuscripts with regard to the issues of 1) judgments in relation to presentations, 2) assumptions as acts which run parallel to judgments, 3) improper judgments as distinct from improper ones, 4) objective judgments, and 5) states of affairs as correlatives of judging acts. While we see Husserl freeing himself in many respects from the Brentanian theory of judgment which he had learned in Vienna and again in Halle, it is at the same time seen that Husserl’s views are quite representative of Austrian phenomenology insofar as they involve both descriptive psychology and object-theory, though without any pretense of establishing a novel method of philosophy. (shrink)

This paper aims to address the relevance of the natural sciences for transcendental phenomenology, that is, the issue of naturalism. The first section distinguishes three varieties of naturalism and corresponding forms of naturalization: an ontological one, a methodological one, and an epistemological one. In light of these distinctions, in the second section, I examine the main projects aiming to “naturalize phenomenology”: neurophenomenology, front-loaded phenomenology, and formalized approaches to phenomenology. The third section then considers the commitments of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology with (...) respect to the three varieties of naturalism previously discussed. I argue that Husserl rejected strong and weak forms of epistemological naturalism, strong methodological naturalism, and ontological naturalism. The fourth section presents the argument that Husserl endorsed a weak, conditional form of methodological naturalism. This point is illustrated with Husserl’s proposal of “somatology,” a natural science apt to study the corporeality of the lived body. The final section addresses the complementarity and respective limits of the transcendental phenomenological and the natural scientific frameworks. I argue that, on Husserl’s account, the function of transcendental phenomenology with respect to the natural sciences is to provide them with an epistemological foundation and an ontological clarification. I suggest that certain natural sciences can be understood, within the transcendental phenomenological framework, as “sciences of constitution,” that is, as sciences investigating the contribution of real structures acting as conditions of possibility for the occurrence of certain kinds of comprehensive unities in lived experience. (shrink)

This paper concerns Bertrand Russell’s changing views on negative judgement. ‘Negative judgement’ is considered in the context of three theories of judgement that Russell put forth at different times: a dual relation theory ; a multiple relation theory ; a psychological theory of judgement. Four issues are singled out for a more detailed discussion: quality dualism versus quality monism, that is, the question whether judgement comes in two kinds, acceptance and rejection, or whether there is only one judgement-quality ; the (...) structure of negative judging; the problem of truth-making for negative facts; the different roles of ‘fact’ in Russell’s theories of truth. What emerges from the discussion is a rough chronology of Russell’s views on negative judgement during the period from 1903 to 1948. (shrink)

In this paper I suggest an answer to the question of what Frege means when he says that his logical system, the Begrijfsschrift, is like the language Leibniz sketched, a lingua characteristica, and not merely a logical calculus. According to the nineteenth century studies, Leibniz's lingua characteristica was supposed to be a language with which the truths of science and the constitution of its concepts could be accurately expressed. I argue that this is exactly what the Begriffsschrift is: it is (...) a language, since, unlike calculi, its sentential expressions express truths, and it is a characteristic language, since the meaning of its complex expressions depend only on the meanings of their constituents and on the way they are put together. In fact it is in itself already a science composed in accordance with the Classical Model of Science. What makes the Begrijfsschrift so special is that Frege is able to accomplish these goals with using only grammatical or syncategorematic terms and so has a medium with which he can try to show analyticity of the theorems of arithmetic. (shrink)

In this paper I suggest an answer to the question of what Frege means when he says that his logical system, the Begriffsschrift, is like the language Leibniz sketched, a lingua characteristica, and not merely a logical calculus. According to the nineteenth century studies, Leibniz’s lingua characteristica was supposed to be a language with which the truths of science and the constitution of its concepts could be accurately expressed. I argue that this is exactly what the Begriffsschrift is: it is (...) a language, since, unlike calculi, its sentential expressions express truths, and it is a characteristic language, since the meaning of its complex expressions depend only on the meanings of their constituents and on the way they are put together. In fact it is in itself already a science composed in accordance with the Classical Model of Science. What makes the Begriffsschrift so special is that Frege is able to accomplish these goals with using only grammatical or syncategorematic terms and so has a medium with which he can try to show analyticity of the theorems of arithmetic. (shrink)

A response to critics, Douglas Patterson and Mark Textor, on Künne's modest theory of truth in *Conceptions of Truth*.

Although at present analytic philosophy is practiced mainly in the English-speaking world, it is to a considerable part the invention of German speakers. Its emergence owes much to Russell, Moore, and American Pragmatism, but even more to Frege, Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. No one would think of analytic philosophy as a specifically Anglophone phenomenon, if the Nazis had not driven many of its pioneers out of central Europe.

Julius König is famous for his mistaken attempt to demonstrate that the continuum hypothesis was false. It is also known that the only positive result that could have survived from his proof is the paradox which bears his name. Less famous is his 1914 book Neue Grundlagen der Logik, Arithmetik und Mengenlehre. Still, it contains original contributions to logic, like the concept of metatheory and the solution of paradoxes based on the refusal of the law of bivalence. We are going (...) to discover them by analysing the content of the book. (shrink)

Pragmatic Ambiguity: The Thetic Function of Modality The aim of this paper is to present an overview of the pragmatic aspects of ambiguity present in deontic sentences, which may have three pragmatic functions: a prescriptive or a descriptive or a constitutive function. This type of ambiguity is investigated on the lexical, phrasal, and sentential level. The discussion focuses on the deontic constructions of the German verb sollen and the English shall as they are used in legal texts. It also includes (...) comments on the thetic function of the Latin imperative mood and the subjunctive mood. (shrink)

Ce numéro de Philosophiques rend hommage au philosophe d’origine autrichienne Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) à l’occasion de son 150e anniversaire de naissance. Il est consacré à l’oeuvre du jeune Husserl durant la période de Halle (1886-1901) et réunit plusieurs spécialistes des études husserliennes qui jettent un regard neuf sur cette période méconnue dans la philosophie du père de la phénoménologie. Avec un souci de situer Husserl dans le contexte historique auquel appartiennent ses principaux interlocuteurs durant cette période, ces études portent sur (...) des thèmes tels l’intentionnalité dans son rapport à Bernard Bolzano, Franz Brentano et Kazimierz Twardowski ; sa théorie du jugement et des assomptions ; sa philosophie des mathématiques et de la logique ; sa contribution au débat sur la Gestalt ; ses échanges avec le néokantisme de Marbourg, et notamment avec Paul Natorp, etc. Ces études sont suivies d’une disputatio autour d’un ouvrage récent portant sur le projet philosophique de Husserl et le sens de sa phénoménologie aujourd’hui. (shrink)

This paper examines causal theories of reference with respect to how plausible an account they give of non-physical natural kind terms such as ‘gene’ as well as of the truth of the associated theoretical claims. I first show that reference fixism for ‘gene’ fails. By this, I mean the claim that the reference of ‘gene’ was stable over longer historical periods, for example, since the classical period of transmission genetics. Second, I show that the theory of partial reference does not (...) do justice to some widely held realist intuitions about classical genetics. This result is at loggerheads with the explicit goals usually associated with partial theories of reference, which is to defend a realist semantics for scientific terms. Thirdly, I show that, contrary to received wisdom and perhaps contrary to physics and chemistry, neither reference fixism nor partial reference are necessary in order to hold on to scientific realism about biology. I pinpoint the reasons for this in the nature of biological kinds, which do not even remotely resemble natural kinds (i.e., Lockean real essences) as traditionally conceived. (shrink)

In the 19th century, "Psychophysical Parallelism" was the most popular solution of the mind-body problem among physiologists, psychologists and philosophers. (This is not to be mixed up with Leibnizian and other cases of "Cartesian" parallelism.) The fate of this non-Cartesian view, as founded by Gustav Theodor Fechner, is reviewed. It is shown that Feigl's "identity theory" eventually goes back to Alois Riehl who promoted a hybrid version of psychophysical parallelism and Kantian mind-body theory which was taken up by Feigl's teacher (...) Moritz Schlick. (shrink)