Heidegger

Abstract

Genetic logic, the method of logical analysis inaugurated by Edmund Husserl, has open new and wide horizons in studies of the foundations of the sciences. Husserl’s innovations, however, were rendered less effective and less acceptable by an injection of metaphysical views (as first observed by Nicolai Hartmann) resulting in obscurities and misunderstandings. Curiously, as Husserl’s metaphysics stiffened with age, his logic was worked to a deep and pliable technique, and his later writings (Formal and Transcendental Logic, for example) are a blend of logical insights and questionable assertions on the transcendental ego and intersubjectivity. This blurring of the distinction between logic and metaphysics hardly makes for an attractive presentation, least of all to an outsider who has not been broken in to Husserl’s manifold quirks. Genetic logic must be freed from all remnants of idealism if it is to become an autonomous discipline, as Husserl himself might have wished before 1929. The present note is meant as a step in this direction.