Abstract
Phenomenology: From descriptive psychology to descriptive epistemology; wholes and parts, formal ontology, and the idea of a mathesis universalis; essences and eidetic intuition; and intersubjectivity, the paradox of subjectivity, and ultimate grounding.
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Notes
- 1.
The leading naturalist at the time of Carl Stumpf in Germany was Ernst Haeckel.
- 2.
Naturalistic psychology was already predominant in Germany one generation before Carl Stumpf, e.g., in the research of Hermann von Helmholtz.
- 3.
Spiegelberg 1960, vol. I, esp. 59f.
- 4.
- 5.
Husserl’s arguments against a psychologism that has its foundations in empirical psychology in ch. 3–8 of the first volume of the Logical Investigations I (henceforth LI) are, seen with a grain of salt, similar to the arguments of the Neo-Kantians and have been praised by the Neo-Kantian Paul Natorp.
- 6.
Stumpf rejected psychologism in this sense, but he also rejected the dominating epistemology of the Neo-Kantians without indicating what kind of epistemology ought to replace it. See Spiegelberg 1960 vol. I, 56; on Brentano and intentionality see 39ff.
- 7.
Spiegelberg 1960, vol. I. esp. 58ff.
- 8.
Spiegelberg 1960 vol. I, 63f.
- 9.
Essentia is the Latin counterpart of the Greek eidos in the philosophical terminology of Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages. For the sake of simplicity this investigation prefers Latin terms, e.g., reductio/reduction for epochē.
- 10.
Husserl criticized the Kantian and Neo-Kantian interpretation of the a priori as transcendental psychologism several times in the LI. For his critique of Kant’s mistaken theory of the a priori, cf. also Hua III, 145; Hua VII, 198f. Categorial structures are not immediately given in the acts of consciousness. They are objective correlates of the acts of consciousness in which they are given.
- 11.
Stumpf rejected Husserl’s new conception of phenomenology after Husserl rejected the definition of phenomenology as descriptive psychology in the second edition of the LI. See Spiegelberg 1960 vol. I, 65f. Husserl criticized his own characterization of phenomenology as descriptive psychology in the first edition of the LI in the preface to the second edition. Descriptive psychology is descriptive phenomenology in the old sense, i.e., it is not the description of experience or classes of experiences of empirical persons or of natural events in general.
- 12.
Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. The usual translation Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge is an abbreviation.
- 13.
In Hua III.
- 14.
In Hua XXV.
- 15.
The Kantian version of “transcendental” implies the hypothetical construction of the unity of transcendental apperception indicated by the “I think” as the highest condition of the possibility of experience that is itself not given in experience, i.e., not a phenomenon. To use “transcendental” in this sense as an adjective for phenomenology is, hence, a flat contradiction.
- 16.
Hua III, §59.
- 17.
The term “apophantic” is derived from Greek apophansis, the technical term for judgment, more precisely for what is meant by judgment in the Aristotelian tradition.
- 18.
This use of the term “category” is much broader than the Kantian understanding of categories as forms of functions in judgments.
- 19.
According to a phenomenology of logic variables in formalized languages refer to contents that can be varied and constants that refer to the syncategorematic parts of well formed expression.
- 20.
A summary of Hua IXX/1 LI II, Investigation III, §§23, 24, and Investigation IV can be found in Hua III, esp. §10–15. See also Hua VII, FTL Appendix I (Beilage I: Syntaktische Formen und syntaktische Stoffe). Cf. Seebohm 1990 on categorical intuition. Husserl’s phenomenology of logic and formal ontology presupposes, according to the interpretation of Jacob Klein, an “Aristotelian theory of abstraction.” Cf. Hopkins 2011, 525f. The problems with this interpretation is that Husserl’s references to Hilbert and other contemporaries are neglected, cf. below Sect. 7.2.
- 21.
Hua III, §16.
- 22.
Husserl 1972, esp. §§29–32.
- 23.
- 24.
- 25.
Hua XIX/1, Investigation IV, §13.
- 26.
Hua XIX/1, Investigation III, §§22–25.
- 27.
- 28.
The chosen translations of the German terms here in Investigation III, §21 are different from the terms chosen in Findlay’s translation vol. II.
- 29.
The term “abstract moment” means that the moment cannot be given by itself. It can only be given as an abstract property, e.g., red, of an independent whole. It can be considered by itself only with the aid of an isolating abstraction bracketing the whole in which it is given.
- 30.
These formal properties of foundations seem to be counterparts of some formal properties of relations, namely of asymmetrical, symmetrical, transitive, and intransitive relations. There are, nevertheless, essential differences between foundations and relations. More will be said ar the end of this section.
- 31.
A material example is, e.g., seeing the more or less sharp contrast between a red spot and its blue background in their spatial extensions.
- 32.
Such foundations within extensions appear as relations in the context of pure logical grammar and in the grammar of natural languages, e.g., above, below, later, earlier.
- 33.
Husserl used the term “unifying foundation,” but this term can be misleading. The parts are not one-sidedly founded in the whole. The givenness of a whole of the parts means, in the proposed interpretation, that they are unified in the whole by a system of relations.
- 34.
Cf. Seebohm 2004, §§25ff. It is obvious that some of the types of wholes just mentioned must be of central interest for the epistemology of the social and the historical human sciences.
- 35.
For instance Husserl 1972, §§33, 34.
- 36.
Members of social wholes are perfect material instances of this formal type. A child of parents in a family can be at the same time a student of a university, a soldier in an army etc. According to the standard terminology of the social sciences members of social wholes can have different social functions or roles in more than one social whole but also in open systems of social collections of individuals.
- 37.
With a grain of salt. it could be said that the organs of an organism are also perfect material instances of such parts. The grain of salt is given, e.g., with materially possible surgical transplantations of organs or parts of organs. The restriction in this material instance of the formal structure of the second type is that they cannot function at the same time in two different organisms. Unfortunately, the term “organic whole” is often used as a metaphor for wholes of a higher order that are by no means covered by the formal definition given for the second type.
- 38.
The problem of natural languages is that they have many grammatically different expressions that can refer to relations, namely verbs, nouns, adjectives and their inflexions, and particles. This list is not complete. What can be added is that such systems are different in, e.g., Indo-European, Finno-Ugrian and language families in East Asia. Research in this field would be interesting as a link between formal and historical linguistics.
- 39.
The structured unifying systems of unicellular organisms can exist by themselves, but additional structured systems of the relations of cells in higher organisms can be grafted upon the unifying system of relations in unicellular organisms. The basic social-biological system of family relations can be the substrate first of additional customary relations and then beyond that even of legal relations.
- 40.
Cases in which almost closed connections are called “wholes” occur very often in the human sciences. Given the complexity of their subject matter, it will be in most cases impossible, but also often irrelevant, to ask for a final decision.
- 41.
- 42.
Husserl also often used the term “ethnology.” How to distinguish between such a phenomenological ethnology and ethnology as an empirical human science is a question that causes additional problems. Without further comments the distinction, e.g., of homeworld and alienworld could be understood as a distinction belonging to Alfred Schutz’s static phenomenology of the social world or, in Husserl’s terms, to the static phenomenology of the lifeworld.
- 43.
Implicative conditionals refer to sufficient conditions that admit predictions presupposing positing the antecedens in the second premise of a modus ponens. Replicative conditionals refer to necessary conditions that admit retrodictions in a modified modus ponens in which the consequent is assumed in the second premise.
- 44.
Hua XIX, 2, LI, 2nd ed. Introduction §7.
- 45.
Hua XIX 1, §38.
- 46.
For a comprehensive account of different types of transcendental psychologism in Husserl see Seebohm 1962, §§3 and 28.
- 47.
- 48.
Cf. the first part of Ideas I: Wesen und Wesenserkenntnis i.e., “Essences and the Cognition of Essences” (my translation). The misleading impression is that this part can be understood as an explication of methodical principles that can be given before and outside the phenomenological reduction.
- 49.
Kant KGS III, Critique of Pure Reason, B 180f, cf. B 103. See Makreel 1990, Chap. 2, esp. 29ff. See also Grünewald 2009, 255 for a similar interpretation of Kantian schemata and Husserlian empirical conceptualization and essences.
- 50.
Greek hylē is Latin materia. On the level of passive synthesis “hyletic” can always be read as “material” and vice versa. The hyletic field is, seen in this way, a field and not a collection of atomic sense data or impressions.
- 51.
- 52.
See Husserl’s explication of the meaning of concept (Begriff) and essence (Wesen) in Hua III, §22.
- 53.
More precisely, the rules of the Categories and the Topic of the Aristotelian Organon. This type of induction and its logical implications must be strictly distinguished from the induction of predictions and causal connections.
- 54.
Free fantasy variation in the narrower sense creates images, not schemata in the Kantian sense, out of images in poetry and mythology: golden mountains, lions with human heads, human bodies with the head of a falcon, vampires, and so on and so forth.
- 55.
This is precisely the strategy proposed in Ideas I on regional ontology, see Hua III, §9, 23f.
- 56.
Husserl, 1972, section III, §83b; see Schutz 1932, §§37, 38 and 43 on the foundation of sociological concepts and ideal types in the everyday conceptualizations of the social world. See also Grünewald 2009, 252, cf. 124. Grünewald’s phenomenological explication of Weber’s ideal types as noematic systems in his interpretation of noema and noesis in Ideas I. The difference between his explication and the explication of Schutz’s adaptation of Weber’s ideal types mentioned above is only a terminological difference. Noesis and noema are other terms for intentional acts, cogitationes, and intentional objects, cogitata, in the Cartesian Meditations.
- 57.
Hua I, §42.
- 58.
Cf. the editor’s introduction Hua I. Husserl had distributed typescripts of the completed German CM, (not only the French version that was reviewed by A. Schutz) to the members of the Freiburg circle; cf. Embree 2009a, 177f.
- 59.
Philosophy in the Crisis of the European Humanity 1935, Hua VI, 314–348.
- 60.
Gurwitsch 1929.
- 61.
Schutz 1932.
- 62.
For a short discussion of such viewpoints as they have emerged in the historical development of the phenomenological movement, see Part V, Sect. 11.3.
- 63.
- 64.
Hua VI, §53; see note 70 about the meaning of Subjekt sein and Objekt sein in German.
- 65.
Hua XXXIX, texts 23, Beilage XIX, XX and text 24. See also text 25, the rejection of the Cartesian radical doubt in the existence of the world. For an explicit reference to the paradox of subjectivity see 251.
- 66.
Even a theorem in the natural sciences that has been confirmed up until now in experimental research can be disconfirmed by further experiments in the future.
- 67.
To the best of my knowledge, no explicit account has been given for (1) in Ideas I or elsewhere by Husserl.
- 68.
Hua III, §61.
- 69.
- 70.
Die Paradoxie der menschlichen Subjektivität: das Subjektsein für die Welt und zugleich Objektsein in der Welt, Hua VI, §53. The verb “being” in the English translation can be understood as an indicator of the subject-predicate relation. The German terms “Subjektsein” and “Objektsein” are, on the contrary, ontological terms for two kinds of beings.
- 71.
Hua VI, §58, 211.
- 72.
Seebohm 1982, 145f.
- 73.
- 74.
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Seebohm, T.M. (2015). The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology. In: History as a Science and the System of the Sciences. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 77. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8_2
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