Abstract
Husserl’s lifelong interest in Kant eventually becomes a preoccupation in his later years when he finds his phenomenology in competition with Neokantianism for the title of transcendental philosophy. Some issues that Husserl is concerned with in Kant are bound up with the works of Lambert. Kant believed that the role played by principles of sensibility in metaphysics should be determined by a “general phenomenology” on which Lambert had written. Kant initially believed that man is capable only of symbolic cognition, not intellectual intuition. Lambert saw an increasing need in mathematics for symbolic cognition as exemplified in his proofs of the irrationality of π and e. Kant takes from Leibniz and Lambert an unrestricted notion of construction, allowing him to view mathematics as constructing its concepts in intuition, while Lambert’s proofs convince him that all mathematical problems are eventually solvable. Husserl criticizes Kant’s intuitionism for its inadequate accommodation of meaning to intuition, which he redresses with his theory of categorial intuition. This may improve on Kant’s intuition of the axiom of parallels but not so clearly on his spatial intuition. Husserl opposes Kant’s view of space as the form of outer intuition with his own view of it as the form of things. Husserl’s exploration of the geometry of visual space, which involves his earliest uses of epoché and reduction, converges however with Hilbert’s logical analysis of Kantian spatial intuition in leading to Euclidean spatial judgments. Hilbert’s analysis leads him to affirm the solvability of all well posed mathematical problems, a thesis complicated by the outbreak of logical paradoxes. Untroubled by such paradoxes, Husserl develops a supramathematics of all possible deductive systems whose completeness implicitly would also provide solutions of all such problems. Husserl’s full transcendental turn coincides with his realization that in effecting his Copernican turn, Kant was really the first to detect the “secret longing” of modern philosophy for a phenomenological clarification of being. Husserl now finds that Kant’s transcendental deductions presuppose a pure ego not adequately analyzed by Kant that survives the phenomenological reduction. Husserl’s idealism leads him to develop his own intuitionism, which adds to Kant’s, a “method of clarification” of mathematical concepts intended to clarify difficult impossibility proofs, but neither Husserl nor Kant base arithmetic on time. Husserl’s critique of the room left in Kant’s idealism, for things in themselves, leads to his own monadological solution of the problem of intersubjectivity. Husserl’s final judgment on Kant is that his form of transcendental idealism did not enable him to achieve absolute subjectivity through a genuine transcendental reduction.
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Notes
- 1.
Kant 1999, p. 108.
- 2.
Kant 1992b, p. 389.
- 3.
Kant 1981, p. 150.
- 4.
Kant 1992b, p. 378.
- 5.
loc. cit., p. 379.
- 6.
loc. cit. p. 379.
- 7.
loc. cit. p. 389.
- 8.
Kant 1999, p. 116.
- 9.
See Falkenstein 1991 for thorough analysis of this argument.
- 10.
loc. cit., p. 114–115. Kant sought to protect intellectual knowledge from “contamination” by sensible concepts.
- 11.
loc. cit., p. 118. Lambert found the need for symbolic cognition in four distinct but not unrelated contexts: the theory of infinite series, the logic of contradiction, the use of imaginary numbers, and the problem of parallels.
- 12.
Phenomenologie, §122. The Phenomenologie comprises Lambert’s effort to develop the theory of sensible appearance and semblance into a “transcendent optics” that incorporates “points of view” and “perspectives.” It is the last of the four books into which Lambert 1764 is divided, beginning with Dïanoïologie, the theory of thinking, then Alethiologie, the theory of truth, and Semeotik, the theory of signs and their meaning. Concerning these first two books Lambert explains that “These two sciences would suffice were the human intellect not obliged to bind its knowledge to words and signs and if truth did not often appear to the intellect in a very different semblance.” (Lambert 1764, Preface, p. 4) For an insightful discussion of the kinship and differences of Lambert’s phenomenology with Husserl’s, see Orth 1984.
- 13.
Kant 1992b, p. 390.
- 14.
Kant will take 7 years to reply to Lambert’s letter which will consist of nothing less than the version of the Critique of Pure Reason he announced for publication in 1776, for which he wrote the following dedication to Lambert: “You have honored me with your letters. The endeavor to give at your request an idea of the method of pure philosophy has given rise to a series of reflections on how to develop this idea lying still obscurely within me, and as the possibilities widen within each step forward, my answers have been continually delayed. This work can serve in lieu of an answer, as far as the speculative part is concerned. Since it is due to your instigation and pointers, I would hope that it could always be with you by the endeavor to add to it in your research… It is hardly necessary to add that this work borrows a suggestion from your letter and is not the end.” (AA18, p. 64). But Lambert died suddenly in 1777, and Kant took four more years to add to his Critique himself before he published it in 1781. We know from Kern 1964, p. 430 that Husserl studied their correspondence, so Kant’s dedication would not have surprised him.
- 15.
Kant 1999, p. 134.
- 16.
Kant 2005, p. 139.
- 17.
loc. cit., p. 201.
- 18.
AA16, p. 174.
- 19.
loc. cit., p. 175.
- 20.
Kant 1992c, p. 51. Lambert 1770 doubted that his exposition of the problem “will be read by those who could profit most by it, namely who spend time and effort trying to square the circle. There will always be many such persons who understand little of geometry, and are unable to assess their own powers.” (p. 140)
- 21.
loc. cit., p. 50. Later in the 1790s Kant is convinced that “to determine the rational horizon of human cognition is one of the noblest and hardest occupations of the human spirit.” (loc. cit. p. 449)
- 22.
Dianoilogie, §495
- 23.
Leibniz 1981 , p. 376. Some geometers already rejected the quadratrix as not being constructible.
- 24.
loc. cit., p. 377.
- 25.
loc. cit., p. 377.
- 26.
Kant never limits the means of constructing mathematical concepts.
- 27.
AA14, p. 6.
- 28.
loc. cit., p. 9.
- 29.
Adickes 1924, p. 21.
- 30.
In his memoir Lambert 1768 expresses tanυ as the quotient of the infinite power series for sinυ and cosυ, and uses a generalization of the Euclidean algorithm and complicated recursions to obtain an infinite continued fraction for tanυ; he then proves that the existence of integers a and b, for which \( \tan \upupsilon =\frac{a}{b} \) for a rational υ, would imply an infinite decreasing sequence of integers. Lambert concluded that if, as he conjectured, π were transcendental, it would not admit of a “geometrical construction”, i.e. with ruler and compass. (p. 322)
- 31.
Lambert 1769.
- 32.
loc. cit., p. 357. Lambert observed that such series may not converge for all values of the time.
- 33.
Kant 2005, p. 176. Kant associates this forerunner of his Second Analogy with the Newtonian principle that “the cause of appearances must be in commercio with the world.” (p. 177) Kant is known to have followed progress on the three-body problem with interest, especially the most important case of the mutual perturbations of Jupiter and Saturn.
- 34.
loc. cit., p. 247.
- 35.
AA24, p. 522.
- 36.
Kant 1997, Axx.
- 37.
loc. cit., A5/B8.
- 38.
loc. cit., A5/B9.
- 39.
loc. cit., A314/B371.
- 40.
loc. cit., A472/B500.
- 41.
loc. cit., A35.
- 42.
loc. cit., A33. Kant refers here to his two “axioms of time” which are taken from the four axioms and three postulates of chronometry formulated in Lambert 1771.
- 43.
loc. cit., A37/B54.
- 44.
loc. cit., A477/B505. Kant admitted some questions about nature “cannot be solved at all, e.g. how pieces of matter attract on another” (Kant 2002, p. 138–139), even though Newton’s inverse square law governing such incomprehensible attractions is “cognizable a priori”.
- 45.
loc. cit., A480/B508.
- 46.
Schultz 1803, p. 1x.
- 47.
This is explained in the informative article by Bullynck 2009.
- 48.
Quoted from Bullynck, loc. cit., p. 157.
- 49.
See Bauer 2005, who also finds that Leibniz’ series yields four such digits in 1000 steps!
- 50.
A782/B810.
- 51.
loc. cit., A789/B819. Last emphasis mine.
- 52.
loc. cit., A790/B818.
- 53.
loc. cit., A790/B818. Kant may have been influenced by Lambert’s arguments that “apogogical proofs always carry more necessity than direct proofs, since they expose the impossibility or absurdity of the contrary and thereby make the theorem itself necessarily true given that the contrary would under the conditions assumed be impossible or absurd.” (Dianoilogie, §352).
- 54.
In a very interesting paper Vuillemin 1961, argues that Lambert’s proof was actually adopted by Kant as a model of his transcendental idealism, in particular his indirect proof of it in the Antinomies.
- 55.
Mancuso 1996 suggested that by grounding reductio proofs on his constructivist assumptions Kant followed “a long tradition critical of their use and determined to limit their use as a last resort.” (p. 107) Brouwer gave what he called “an appropriate reworking of Lambert’s negative irrationality proof of π” into a positive one (see Mancuso 1998, p. 33). But Kant’s claim, which he repeated often in lectures, that “contradiction always carries with it more clarity of representation than the best connection and thereby more closely approaches the intuitiveness of demonstration” leaves doubt he would find Brouwer’s proofs more “intuitive” than Lambert’s.
- 56.
A716/B744.
- 57.
Parsons 1980 observed that even if not an official part of his doctrine, this distinction was implicit in Kant’s arguments.
- 58.
In his extensive reflections on the problem of parallels Kant finally settles for a conceptual proof of an equivalent of Euclid’s axiom, that is, one that foregoes any construction. (AA14, p. 23–48)
- 59.
Ewald 1996, p. 166.
- 60.
Lambert 1895, p. 199.
- 61.
loc. cit., p. 203.
- 62.
Husserl 1970a, p. 220. Reviewing how the ideal of grounding the deductive calculus on forms that are most primitive and natural was pursued by Boole, Pierce, and Schröder, Husserl said that this ideal “can be attained; and older German logicians – above all, Leibniz and Lambert – were on the way to attaining it” (Husserl 1994, p. 102).
- 63.
loc. cit., p. 214.
- 64.
loc. cit., p. 221.
- 65.
loc. cit., p. 76.
- 66.
loc. cit., p. 833.
- 67.
loc. cit., p. 833.
- 68.
Lohmar 2010, p. 83–84.
- 69.
Husserl 1970a, p. 818.
- 70.
Would this accommodate Lobachevsky’s categorial intuition of his axiom which postulates a plurality of parallels to a given line through an external point? Is the Euclidean admixture of the concept of parallel with the category of unity more “intuitive” than Lobachevsky’s admixture of it with the category of plurality? Husserl says that “if we use the term ‘space’ of the familiar type of order of the world of phenomena, talk of ‘spaces’ for which, e.g. the axiom of parallels does not hold, is naturally senseless.” (loc. cit., p. 243) But his account of categorial intuition provides no reason at all why the admixture of the concept of parallels with the category of plurality would even be unintuitive, much less “senseless”. In fact, Lobachevsky argued that hyperbolic geometry based on his axiom was more coherent than Euclidean geometry.
- 71.
Husserl 1997, p. 43.
- 72.
loc. cit., p. 44.
- 73.
loc. cit., p. 99.
- 74.
loc. cit., p. 111.
- 75.
loc. cit., p. 204–205. See Boi 2004 for a thorough analysis of the difficulties Husserl encounters with these expansions of the visual field. A clear and instructive account of Husserl’s theory of the basis of geometrical intuition in perceptual space, as well as his synthesis of the latter from various kinesthetic systems, can be found in da Silva 2013.
- 76.
loc. cit., p. 199.
- 77.
Husserl 1991, p. 144.
- 78.
Husserl 1997, p. 118.
- 79.
Zage 1980, p. 289.
- 80.
Busemann 1955, pp. 65–81. Desargues’ theorem states that two triangles are in central perspective from a point in space if and only if they are axially perspective, i.e. the intersections of their pairs of corresponding sides are collinear. This intuitive “Raumsatz,” as Hilbert calls it, implies that the two triangles are optically indistinguishable from a point in space, i.e. one is the perspective image of the other, just in case they both vanish when viewed from any point on their axis. The theorem can be proved for planar triangles simply by projection from a point in space.
- 81.
Husserl 2003, p. 462.
- 82.
Hilbert 1971, p. 88.
- 83.
Husserl 1994, p. 17.
- 84.
loc. cit., p. 17.
- 85.
J. Sommer 1900, p. 291. This allows Hilbert to satisfy his axioms in a countable algebraic field.
- 86.
Mach 1960, p. 121. On the question of Lambert’s anticipation of Beltrami’s pseudosphere, see Schur 1905. As I have indicated elsewhere in this volume, it was Mach’s quest for a “universal physical phenomenology” that Husserl credited with pioneering the descriptive phenomenology that Husserl subsequently radicalized. But he was wrong to think that Mach’s motivation was to ground mathematical physics in intuition.
- 87.
- 88.
loc. cit, p. 305. Lambert was talking about algebra, not arithmetic, in his passage from his Semiotik. It is a pity Husserl did not consider his fuller discussion of this issue in his Phenomenologie.
- 89.
loc. cit., p. 305.
- 90.
Husserl’s own loss of confidence in his theory of categorial intuition over the years is indicated by Lohmar 2002.
- 91.
Hilbert 1971, p. 106.
- 92.
Hilbert 2004, p. 284.
- 93.
Husserl 1994, p. 85.
- 94.
loc. cit. p. 134.
- 95.
loc. cit., p. 437.
- 96.
Husserl 2001a, p. 244.
- 97.
loc. cit., p. 243–244.
- 98.
Husserl 2001b, p. 37.
- 99.
Husserl 1971, p. 240.
- 100.
Ewald 1996, p. 1101–1102.
- 101.
loc. cit., p. 1102.
- 102.
loc. cit., p. 1105.
- 103.
Quoted in Hallet 1995, p. 161, from Hilbert’s 1905 lectures.
- 104.
Peckhaus and Kahle 2002.
- 105.
Kant 2006, p. 17–18.
- 106.
Kant 2002, p. 81.
- 107.
loc. cit., p. 81.
- 108.
Reid 1970, p. 63.
- 109.
- 110.
loc. cit., p. 201.
- 111.
Peirce 1966, p. 172. Peirce praised Schubert’s calculus as “the most extensive application of Boolean algebra which has ever been made.”
- 112.
Gray 2000, p. 268. By the 1990s Schubert’s calculus was finally provided with a rigorous foundation, through the combined efforts of some of the best mathematicians of the twentieth century.
- 113.
Husserl 2008, 90.
- 114.
Gray 2000, p. 258.
- 115.
Husserl 2006, p. 18.
- 116.
loc. cit., p. 18.
- 117.
loc. cit., p. 19.
- 118.
Husserl 2014, p. 6.
- 119.
loc. cit., §62.
- 120.
loc. cit., §57.
- 121.
loc. cit., §57. Kant argued that we can find no substance behind this ‘I think:’ “For we cannot judge even from our own consciousness whether as soul we are persisting or not, because we ascribe to our identical Self only that of which we are conscious; and so we must necessarily judge that we are the very same in the whole of the time of which we are conscious. But from the standpoint of someone else we cannot declare this to be valid because, since in the soul we encounter no persisting appearance other than the representation “I,” which accompanies and connects all of them, we can never make out whether this I (a mere thought) does not flow as well as all the other thoughts that are linked to one another through it.” (A364)
- 122.
loc. cit., §83.
- 123.
loc. cit., §143.
- 124.
loc. cit., §143.
- 125.
- 126.
loc. cit., p. 294.
- 127.
Husserl 1980, p. 70.
- 128.
loc. cit., p. 71.
- 129.
loc. cit., p. 74.
- 130.
loc. cit., p. 74.
- 131.
loc. cit., p. 74.
- 132.
loc. cit., p. 75.
- 133.
loc. cit., p. 75.
- 134.
Husserl 1970a, b, p. 653. Here π is classified with “mere concepts” for which “we have nominal expression inspired by signifigant intentions in which the objects of our reference are ‘thought’ more or less indefinitely, and particularly in the indefinite form of an A as the mere bearer of definitely named attributes. To mere thinking ‘presentation’ is opposed: plainly this means the intuition which gives fulfilment, and adequate fulfilment, to the mere meaning-intention.” The unpresentability of π, referred to indefinitely as ‘a transcendental number,’ means that there is no intuition that adequately fulfills its concept; so one should not expect that the proof of the impossibility of constructing it algebraically would be intuitive. In fact, Lindeman’s proof of this made crucial use of Euler’s equation e iπ = − 1.
- 135.
Husserl’s intuitionism, unlike Brouwer’s, is not strongly “revisionist,” as van Atten 2002 explains. We saw Brouwer give what he called “an appropriate reworking of Lambert’s negative irrationality proof of π” into a positive one. Kant’s embrace of Lambert’s proof as evidence of the solvability of mathematical problems appeared to contravene his own intuitionism, but he insisted that apagogic proofs by contradiction “carry more intuitiveness” than direct ones. Nor did Husserl evince any inclination to revise such a proof on principle. Van Atten also sees in Husserl’s proposed “method of clarification” evidence of his “weak revisionism,” but his efforts to clarify countersensical judgments about ‘squaring the circle’ seem too obscure to count as any kind of revision or foundation. A precise determination of his weak revisionism is important in view of van Atten’s elegant argument that such revisionism would entail that he should have been a strong revisionist. All of which leads inescapably to Husserl’s pluralism in philosophy of mathematics, as argued forcibly by Hartimo 2012.
- 136.
loc. cit., p. 81.
- 137.
loc. cit., p. 82.
- 138.
loc. cit., p. 82.
- 139.
loc. cit., p. 83.
- 140.
loc. cit., p. 83.
- 141.
Husserl 2002, p. 288.
- 142.
loc. cit., p. 288. We wonder how analogous Husserl regards categorial intuition to seeing.
- 143.
loc. cit., p. 297–298.
- 144.
Husserl 2008, p. 109.
- 145.
Husserl cites the notorious claim in the Schematism chapter that while “space is the pure image of all magnitudes of outer sense,” says Kant, “the pure schema of magnitude… as a concept of the understanding, is number, which is a representation that summarizes the successive addition of one (homogeneous) unit to another. Thus number is nothing other than the unity of the synthesis of the manifold of an intuition in general, because I generate time itself in the apprehension of the intuition.” (A142/B182) We shall try to put this curious claim in context later.
- 146.
Husserl 2002, p. 475.
- 147.
A736/B764. Kant would prefer not to call them “dogmata.”
- 148.
A164/B205 This controversial claim is convincingly defended by Anderson 2004, who shows independently of Kant’s theory of intuition, that the non-conceptual content of 7 + 5 = 12, and addition formulas generally, cannot be fitted into a hierarchy of concept containment for numbers comprising the criterion of analyticity drawn from traditional logic.
- 149.
B111.
- 150.
Correspondence, p. 284.
- 151.
loc. cit., p. 285. This was essentially his view of arithmetic already in the Dissertation.
- 152.
Indeed, it was Kant himself who managed to have the Architectonic published.
- 153.
Lambert 1771, §78.
- 154.
A78/B104.
- 155.
- 156.
- 157.
Martin 1985, p. 91.
- 158.
Husserl 2001c, p. 410.
- 159.
Lambert 1771, §875. The fundamental theorem of arithmetic enshrines the primes as its basic building blocks without providing any criterion for their recognition.
- 160.
loc. cit., §875. The order of prime numbers, said Euler, “is a mystery that the human mind has not been able to penetrate… which is all the more surprising since arithmetic provides us with sure rules for continuing their progression, without however, allowing us to perceive the least mark of an order.” (Opera Arithmetica, additamenta, p. 639)
- 161.
(L) is a special case of “Lambert’s series,” around which a fair literature has grown. G.H. Hardy and J.E. Littlewood: 1921, showed that a theorem about general Lambert series actually implies the prime number theorem. For their role in the mystic number theoretic research of Ramanujan, see R. P. Argawal: 1993.
- 162.
In denying “local order” among the primes, Lambert assimilates their apparent lawlessness to that of the non-repeating decimal expansions of irrational numbers, which cannot be calculated “der Stelle nach:” to calculate any one digit one must first calculate all its predecessors. He conjectured all their digits will occur with equal frequency in the long run so that each occurs with equal probability, their series comprising “ein absolutes Nicht Vorauswissen.”(§311) Though determined by a law, we cannot literally predict them, but only wait for the law to generate them. If one arbitrarily draws a number from ten numbers one at a time, we cannot predict what number will be drawn on the hundredth trial: we could no more successfully bet on such draw, says Lambert, than we could on the digits of π. (§323) He claims that there are “uncountably more” such series than those with local order. (§318)
- 163.
Thus \( \frac{x}{1-x}=x+{x}^2+{x}^3+\dots +{x}^n \), \( \frac{x^2}{1-{x}^2}={x}^2+{x}^4+{x}^6+\dots +{x}^{2n} \), \( \frac{x^3}{1-{x}^3}={x}^3+{x}^6+{x}^9+\dots {x}^{3n} \), etc. and in general \( \frac{x_n}{1-{x}^n}={x}^n+{x}^{2n}+{x}^{3n}\dots \) Number theorists I have consulted were amazed that Lambert ever thought of (L) to begin with, in connection with, prime numbers.
- 164.
As it would have been as well for Husserl, who observed that the division indicated in the very first term of Lambert’s (L) “is not in a real sense feasible” (Husserl 1983, p. 238) any more than the calculation of the root of an irrational number. Indeed, he points out that this division along with other examples of infinite series easily leads to false results. (p. 239) This is a good example of what Husserl had in mind when he warned that it will take a “deeper analysis” to determine whether the inverses of his arithmetical operations are defined for given numbers or involve “an impossibility a priori” or that the computation problems they pose are “free of contradiction.” (PoA, p. 293–294)
- 165.
AA10, p. 111. Kant was likely informed of the importance of Lambert’s project by Schultz, who had stressed the need for tables of primes to simplify the theory of logarithms. See Schultz 1803, p. 34–38. Gauss will make use of Lambert’s tables and those of others in his research on the frequency of primes that resulted in his conjecture of the prime number theorem.
- 166.
AA20, p. 420.
- 167.
AA17, p. 485.
- 168.
loc. cit., p. 371.
- 169.
A101.
- 170.
A102.
- 171.
A103.
- 172.
Kant 2005, p. 359–360. This claim is essential for Kant’s refutation of Idealism.
- 173.
Kant 1992c, p. 66.
- 174.
Kant 2002, p. 79.
- 175.
Kant 1999, p. 284.
- 176.
Kant 2000, p. 236.
- 177.
loc. cit., p. 237.
- 178.
loc. cit., p. 237. Later Kant grants that “Plato at least proceeds consistently. Before him there undoubtedly hovered, albeit obscurely, the question that has only lately achieved clear expression: How are synthetic propositions possible a priori?” (Kant 2002, p. 433). Had he realized that space and time were sensuous intuitions whose objects are only appearances whose forms are “determined a priori in mathematics,” he would not have sought them in the divine understanding.
- 179.
loc. cit., p. 434.
- 180.
loc. cit., p. 434.
- 181.
loc. cit., p. 449.
- 182.
AA23, p. 200, p. 201.
- 183.
loc. cit., p. 201.
- 184.
In November 1796, Gustav Stark sent Kant a proof of (K) by a “geometrical construction” showing its truth from his figure (AA13, p. 121–124). The possibility that this could have figured in Kant’s reply to Reimarus is explored in an intriguing paper: Marcucci 2001.
- 185.
A822/B850. We now have proof of Gauss’ conjecture which he modeled on the tossing of a coin, where the probability that it would land prime on the Nth toss was 1/ log(N). If the primes were truly random, the error for the prime number coin should be of the order of \( \sqrt{N} \). The Riemann hypothesis would imply just this error and hence explain why the primes look so random. So Lambert’s phenomenological claim, that there is no apparent local order among the primes, touches on a problem at the forefront of mathematical research: the remaining unsolved Hilbert problem. See du Sautoy 2003, p. 166–167.
- 186.
In Husserl 1969 §79, which I have analyzed elsewhere in this volume.
- 187.
loc. cit., A822/B850.
- 188.
A823/B851.
- 189.
Kant 1992c, p. 468.
- 190.
loc. cit., p. 469.
- 191.
I have been pressed on this point by Mirja Hartimo, whose grip on the Double Lecture is second to none.
- 192.
Husserl 1960, p. 86.
- 193.
loc. cit., p. 87.
- 194.
loc. cit., p. 153.
- 195.
loc. cit., p. 107.
- 196.
Husserl 1974b, p. 388. This text is dated 1922/1923.
- 197.
Tonietti 1988, p. 348. As for Einstein, he said Weyl’s theory was beautiful but that it would not account for the stability and distinctness of the spectral lines. He argued that Weyl’s theory made the radiation frequencies of two hydrogen atoms dependent on their history, thereby excluding stable spectra.
- 198.
loc. cit., p. 369–370.
- 199.
Mancosu and Ryckman 2002, p. 147.
- 200.
CoESP, p. 120.
- 201.
loc. cit., p. 199. Earlier, Husserl had implied that Kant had not achieved the radical distinction between the actual world and “transcendental subjectivity, which, as constituting within itself the being-sense of the world, precedes the being of the world and accordingly bears within itself the world’s reality, as an idea constituted actually and potentially within this same transcendental subjectivity.” (Husserl 1969, p. 268)
- 202.
On this see Kern 1977
- 203.
Fink 1970, p. 104.
- 204.
loc. cit., p. 74.
- 205.
Husserl 1967, p. 10.
- 206.
CoESP, p. 184. See Lohmar 2012 for an illuminating and sympathetic account of Husserl’s efforts to conceive a primal ego that satisfies the lofty goals of his phenomenology.
- 207.
loc. cit., p. 184.
- 208.
loc. cit., p. 188.
- 209.
loc. cit., p. 189.
- 210.
loc. cit., p. 189.
- 211.
- 212.
loc. cit., p. 256. Kant’s analysis of consciousness did not fully unravel its intentional implications, says Husserl, “although in his profound doctrine of synthesis he already discovered, basically, the peculiarity of intentional contexts and already practiced, in his own words, genuine intentional analyses.” (Husserl 1974a, b, p. 15)
- 213.
Husserl bases his claim on the extraordinary assumption that “all souls make up a single unity of intentionality with the reciprocal implication of the life-fluxes of the individual subjects, a unity that can be unfolded systematically through phenomenology; what is a mutual externality from the point of view of naïve positivity or objectivity is, when seen from the inside, an intentional mutual internality.” (p. 257)
- 214.
loc. cit., p. 258.
- 215.
loc. cit., p. 259.
- 216.
loc. cit., p. 261.
- 217.
loc. cit., p. 264.
- 218.
loc. cit., p. 264–265.
- 219.
- 220.
loc. cit., p. 52. Husserl was presumably unaware of Kant’s last such gigantic sketch in his Opus Postumum.
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Webb, J. (2017). Husserl and His Alter Ego Kant. In: Centrone, S. (eds) Essays on Husserl's Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics. Synthese Library, vol 384. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1132-4_2
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