Abstract
In Husserl’s early writings (the Logical Investigations and the first section of Ideas I) the main concern of phenomenological investigations is the givenness of the ideal entities of logic and formal ontology. Another field in his earlier writings is the phenomenology of perception and time consciousness. This field of research broadens into the vision of a universal transcendental aesthetics, which, in his later writings, provides the basis for solving the problem of intersubjectivity.1 The final “synthesis” of these fields and problem domains is to be found in the phenomenological theory of the life-world. Lectures and research manuscripts2 of the late period show also that this second field of phenomenological research is for Husserl of increasing significance for his phenomenology of logic, because it provides the background for the phenomenology of the genesis of logical form as a necessary supplement to the earlier static investigations. For various reasons it is not wise to treat manuscripts and lectures as sources for investigations about what Husserl himself might have had in mind. They served Husserl as material for further research and he modified and sometimes even rejected the descriptions of the manuscripts. This is the way in which I myself will use this material in this paper. In addition it has to be taken into account that today the phenomenology of logic has to deal with developments in the field of formalized logic not known to Husserl.
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References
Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962) Hua I, (CM) Meditation V, p. 173. The difficulty is that the Fifth Meditation presupposes contexts of phenomenological descriptions that cannot be found in the first four meditations.
Erfahrung und Urteil, ed. Landgrebe (Hamburg: Meiner, 1985), (EU), Analysen zur passiven Synthesis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), Hua XI (APS).
I have shown in another essay that in these writings Husserl has modified and changed his terminology. See my “Kategoriale Anschauung,” Phänomenologische Forschungen, XXIII (1977): 9–47.
W.V.O. Quine, Set Theory and its Logic (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1963 ). 5“Psychologism revisited” in Phenomenology and the Formal Sciences, eds. Seebohm, Fellesdal, Mohanty ( Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991 ).
Cf., Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, ed. Barry Smith (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1980), G.T. Null, “A First Order Axiom System for Non-Universal Part-Whole and Foundation Relations,” in Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch, ed. L. Embree (Washington D.C.: University Press of America, 1984),p. 463–483.
W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960 ), p. 52. Cf., the essay “The Scope and Language of Science” in The Ways of Paradox and other Essays ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976 ).
S. Haack, Philosophy of Logics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), chapter 5: “Singular Terms,” gives an excellent account of the discussion of names and descriptions (pp. 58–73).
S. Kripke in “Naming and Necessity” in Semantics of Natural Language, ed. Harman and Davidson (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972). The extensional definition is of significance also for certain restrictions on the function D in post-classical semantics. Cf., below pp. 125–26.
Cf.,the answer of J.N. Mohanty, in his “Intentionality and Possible Worlds: Hintikka and Husserl” in Husserl, Intentionality and Cognitive Science, ed. H.L. Dreyfus (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), to J. Hintikka, The Intensions of Intentionality (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975). Hintikka’s response to Mohanty in Dreyfus, and the further development of Hintikka’s position on this question in the essay “Modalization and Modalities”—written together with C. W. Harvey—in Phenomenology and the Formal Sciences, op. cit.
have given an extensive account of these issues elsewhere. See my “Phenomenology of Logic and the Problem of Modalizing,” The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, XIX (October 1988): 235–251. terminology is the terminology of traditional ontology; the ontological term-inology of K.D. Lewis is not. He tells us that for him “actual” does not mean “real, ” but is indexical. Explicit re-definitions of terms must be accepted. But he also said that, according to his “realism,” “possible worlds” are real: “there is an x, if x is possible, then x is real.” There is only one traditional theory in which the difference of possibility, reality=actuality, and necessity collapses. The consequences of the theory of Euclid of Megara cannot be reconciled with modal logic at all. Modal logic becomes meaningless in this framework. Since there is no further explanation of the “new terminology” invented by K.D. Lewis, it is difficult to argue for or against his “realism.’ The statement ”possible worlds are real“ is as meaningless in the traditional ontological terminology as the statement ”triangles are circles“ is for traditional geometrical terminology. Cf. K.D. Lewis, Counterfactuals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), section 4. 1.
J.W. Garson, “Quantification in Modal Logic” in Handbook of Philosophical Logic, II. Extensions of Classical Logic, eds. Gabbay and Guenthner (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), p. 258: “Kripké s system has no terms at all, because the variables are really disguised universal quantifiers.”
Cf., Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften VII ( Stuttgart/Göttingen: Teubner and Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1968 ), p. 217.
Cf. James Mill, “Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind,” Collected Works (London: Baldwin and Chadock, 1829) p. 54 ff; John Stuart Mill, System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (London: Routledge, 1905), book III, chapter 22 and 24. A closer systematic comparison requires another essay.
A sharp distinction should be made between the historical “and’ and the ”and“ of unspecified coexistence. The latter is close to the classical truth functional interpretation of ”and.“ Finally we have the ”and“ of coexistence in
Ulrich Claesges, Husserls Theorie der Raumkonstitution (den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), has collected the Husserlian material about kinaesthesis. I do not agree, however, with his Fichtean idealistic interpretation of kinaesthesis.
Ulrich Blau, Die dreiwertige Logik der Sprache. Ihre Syntax, Semantik und Anwendung in der Sprachanalyse (Berl). in: de Gruyter, 1978) Blau develops a system of three valued logic in which all classical logical truths are valid.
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Seebohm, T.M. (1997). Individuals, Identity, Names: Phenomenological Considerations. In: Hopkins, B.C. (eds) Husserl in Contemporary Context. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1804-2_7
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