Abstract
This epigraph from Formal and Transcendental Logic echoes Husserl’s complaint in the foreword to the second part of volume two of the Logical Investigations about the “often heard, but to my mind grotesque reproach, that I may have rejected psychologism sharply in the first volume of my work, but that I fell back into psychologism in the second.”2 The epigraph, however, also suggests that the Investigations do not go far enough in overcoming psychologism. Only a transcendental phenomenology, it is said, suffices to overcome psychologistic prejudices. On this view, then, the “phenomenological” investigations found in the second volume of the Investigations have merely “paved the way” to the transcendental critique of all cognition found in Husserl’s mature phenomenology. This paper poses two questions: (1) Why, given the rejection of psychologism, is there need for a phenomenology? and (2) Why is there a need for a transcendental phenomenology?
Soon after the publication of the Logische Untersuchungen the reproach was cast that the phenomenological investigations demanded there under the name of the “clarification” of the fundamental concepts of pure logic, investigations which the second volume attempted to block out in broad outline, signified a relapse into psychologism.... The obscurity still generally prevalent today concerning the problem of a universal epistemological psychologism... is something that, at the time, I myself had not entirely overcome; though precisely the “phenomenological” investigations in the second volume, so far as they paved the way to a transcendental phenomenology, opened up at the same time the necessary avenues to the setting and the radical overcoming of the problem of transcendental psychologism.1
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References
E. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic,trans. D. Cairns, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969, 152 [Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft,ed. P. Janssen, Hua XVII, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974, 160–61]
E. Husserl, Logical Investigations,trans. J. N. Findlay, 2 vol., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970, 662 [Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Zweiter Teil: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis,ed. U. Panzer, Husserliana XIXJ2, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1984, 535]
In what follows I am greatly indebted to R. Hanna’s very interesting discussions of the “Prolegomena” in his “Logical Cognition: Husserl’s Prolegomena and the Truth in Psychologism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 251–75, although I have changed his formulations to the point where he would probably not recognize them.
Cf. G. Frege, “Logic,” in Gottlob Frege: Posthumous Writings, ed. H. Hermes et al.,Chicago:: University of Chicago Press, 1979, 145, where Frege speaks of the “most mysterious” character of how something non-mental, viz., a thought, comes into view in a mental act, but he insists that “we do not need to concern ourselves with it in logic.” Cf. also J. N. Mohanty, Husserl and Frege,Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982, 37, and R. HANNA, “Logical Cognition,” 252–53.
E. Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, 2 vols., [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970], 233 [Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, ed., E. Holenstein, Hua XVIII, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975, 2401.
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Drummond, J.J. (2002). The Logical Investigations: Paving the Way to a Transcendental Logic. In: Zahavi, D., Stjernfelt, F. (eds) One Hundred Years of Phenomenology. Phaenomenologica, vol 164. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0093-1_2
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