This paper reconstructs and critically analyzes Husserl’s philosophical engagement with symbolic technologies—those material artifacts and cultural devices that serve to aid, structure and guide processes of thinking. Identifying and exploring a range of tensions in Husserl’s conception of symbolic technologies, I argue that this conception is limited in several ways, and particularly with regard to the task of accounting for the more constructive role these technologies play in processes of meaning-constitution. At the same time, this paper shows that a critical (...) examination of Husserl’s account of symbolic technologies, particularly as developed in his mature, genetic phenomenology, can be enduringly fruitful—if some of the specific conceptual weakness of this account are identified and properly accounted for. My discussion will proceed as follows. In the first part I briefly analyze the early Husserl’s account of the role the ‘method of sensible signs’ plays in arithmetic cognition. In the second, main part I critically examine the bearing the genetic-phenomenological concepts of sedimentation and technization have on the conceptualization of symbolic technologies in Husserl’s work. In the final part I summarize the major strengths and weaknesses of Husserl’s account of symbolic technologies, and in the process make a case for the ongoing relevance of some of the crucial elements of this account. (shrink)

This paper deals with Husserl’s idea of pure logic as it is coined in the Logical Investigations. First, it exposes the formation of pure logic around a conception of completeness ; then, it presents intentionality as the keystone of such a structuring ; and finally, it provides a systematic reconstruction of pure logic from the semiotic standpoint of intentionality. In this way, it establishes Husserlian pure logic as a phenomenological epistemology of mathematical logic.

One major difficulty confronting attempts to clarify the epistemological and ontological status of abstract objects is determining the sense, if any, in which such entities may be characterised as mind and language independent. Our contention is that the tolerant reductionist position of Michael Dummett can be strengthened by drawing on Husserl's mature account of the constitution of ideal objects and mathematical objectivity. According to the Husserlian position we advocate, abstract singular terms pick out weakly mind-independent sedimented meaning-contents. These meaning-contents serve (...) as the ‘thin’ referents of abstract singular terms, but are ultimately founded in prior acts of meaning-constitution. (shrink)

In 1928 Edmund Husserl wrote that “The ideal of the future is essentially that of phenomenologically based (“philosophical”) sciences, in unitary relation to an absolute theory of monads” (“Phenomenology”, Encyclopedia Britannica draft) There are references to phenomenological monadology in various writings of Husserl. Kurt Gödel began to study Husserl’s work in 1959. On the basis of his later discussions with Gödel, Hao Wang tells us that “Gödel’s own main aim in philosophy was to develop metaphysics—specifically, something like the monadology of (...) Leibniz transformed into exact theory—with the help of phenomenology.” (A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy, p. 166) In the Cartesian Meditations and other works Husserl identifies ‘monads’ (in his sense) with ‘transcendental egos in their full concreteness’. In this paper I explore some prospects for a Gödelian monadology that result from this identification, with reference to texts of Gödel and to aspects of Leibniz’s original monadology. (shrink)

Traditionally, conceptual thinking is explored via philosophical analysis or psychological experimentation. We seek to complement these mainstream approaches with the perspective of a first person exploration into pure thinking. To begin with, pure thinking is defined as a process and differentiated from its content, the concepts itself. Pure thinking is an active process and not a series of associative thought-events; we participate in it, we immerse ourselves within its active performance. On the other hand, concepts are also of an experiential (...) nature. And yet, little is known about what is it like to have or produce a thought, a concept, or an idea? Is a concept our own construction, a product of our own activity, or is it something we merely discover instead of producing it? We address these issues in a systematic first person enquiry into pure thinking. (shrink)

In this paper the reader is asked to engage in some simple problem-solving in classical pure number theory and to then describe, on the basis of a series of questions, what it is like to solve the problems. In the recent philosophy of mind this “what is it like” question is one way of signaling a turn to phenomenological description. The description of what it is like to solve the problems in this paper, it is argued, leads to several morals (...) about the epistemology and ontology of classical pure mathematical practice. Instead of simply making philosophical judgments about the subject matter in advance, the exercise asks the reader to briefly engage in a mathematical practice and to then reflect on the practice. (shrink)

In this paper I contrast Husserlian transcendental eidetic phenomenology with some other views of what phenomenology is supposed to be and argue that, as eidetic, it does not admit of being ‘naturalized’ in accordance with standard accounts of naturalization. The paper indicates what some of the eidetic results in phenomenology are and it links these to the employment of reason in philosophical investigation, as distinct from introspection, emotion or empirical observation. Eidetic phenomenology, unlike cognitive science, should issue in a ‘logic’ (...) of consciousness. Instead of being derived from empirical investigations its results should consist of high-level background conditions that are necessary for cognitive science to be possible in the first place. To negate these conditions is to be faced with certain types of ‘material’ contradictions. Some analogies with science – mathematical science – are used to develop the argument. (shrink)

Traditionally, conceptual thinking is explored via philosophical analysis or psychological experimentation. We seek to complement these mainstream approaches with the perspective of a first person exploration into pure thinking. To begin with, pure thinking is defined as a process and differentiated from its content, the concepts itself. Pure thinking is an active process and not a series of associative thought-events; we participate in it, we immerse ourselves within its active performance. On the other hand, concepts are also of an experiential (...) nature. And yet, little is known about what is it like to have or produce a thought, a concept, or an idea? Is a concept our own construction, a product of our own activity, or is it something we merely discover instead of producing it? We address these issues in a systematic first person enquiry into pure thinking. (shrink)

This paper argues that the shared intersubjective accessibility of mathematical objects has its roots in a stratum of experience prior to language or any other form of concrete social interaction. On the basis of Husserl’s phenomenology, I demonstrate that intersubjectivity is an essential stratum of the objects of mathematical experience, i.e., an integral part of the peculiar sense of a mathematical object is its common accessibility to any consciousness whatsoever. For Husserl, any experience of an objective nature has as its (...) correlate a “we,” which he terms the “community of monads”. Thus, even before mathematical objects gain expression, formalization, and axiomatization through natural and scientific language, from a phenomenological viewpoint their objectivity has its roots in raw pre-linguistic though intersubjective experience. Accordingly, I demonstrate the different senses in which the experience of mathematical objects is permeated by intersubjectivity, suggesting a picture of mathematical intersubjectivity as pre-linguistic common experience based on Husserl’s idea of a “community of monads”. (shrink)