The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy

30
EDMUND HUSSERL

Christian Beyer

Synopsis

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Austro-German mathematician and philosopher Edmund Husserl managed both to bring the predominant “psychologistic” philosophy of mathematics and logic of his time to a culmination and to overcome that philosophy. He did so by developing, in his Logical Investigations (LI), a forceful critique of psychologism as well as a positive approach, his “phenomenology of logical experiences (Phänomenologie der logischen Erlebnisse),” which he associated with a platonistic ontology of meaning and thought content.

The work of the early (pre-LI) Husserl can be subdivided into three thematic fields, namely (i) the descriptive psychological study of the basic concepts of arithmetic and logic, (ii) the foundations of a logic of contents (Inhaltslogik), as opposed to a logic of extensions (Umfangslogik), and (iii) the problem of intentional objects and reference. Husserl’s early approaches to (i) and (iii), at least, remain of considerable interest today, whilst his work on (ii) (which will be left aside in what follows) has probably been superseded by the development originating from Frege’s Begriffsschrift and advanced by Russell and Whitehead.

His LI from 1900/1 continue these early approaches in some important respects. LI are the first chief work of phenomenology, which was to become a major current of twentieth-century philosophy, along with analytic philosophy, whose insights have been partly anticipated by Husserl. On the basis of the results achieved in this work, Husserl later developed a method he called “transcendental phenomenology.” This method has us focus, in a radically unprejudiced way, on the essential structures of intentional (i.e. object-directed) consciousness that allow the objects naively taken for granted in the “natural attitude” (which is characteristic of both the “personalistic” stance we use to take in our everyday life and the “naturalistic” stance taken in ordinary science) to “constitute themselves.”

Life and early work

Husserl was born in Prossnitz (Moravia) on 8 April 1859, as the second of four children of the hatter Adolf Husserl and his wife Julie (for the following, see Schuhmann 1977). His parents were non-orthodox Jews; Husserl himself and his wife would later convert to Protestantism. They had three children, one of which died in the First World War. In the years 1876–8 Husserl studied astronomy in Leipzig, where he also attended courses of lectures in mathematics, physics and philosophy (with Wilhem Wundt, among others). His mentor was the philosophy professor Thomas Masaryk, a former student of Brentano’s, who was to become the first president of Czechoslovakia. In 1878 Husserl changed his subject and went to Berlin, to study mathematics with Weierstrass and Kronecker, as well as physics and philosophy. He was particularly impressed with Weierstrass’ scientific ethos and was strongly influenced by him (and Kronecker), and also by Brentano and his pupil Stumpf, in connection with topic (i) above (Ierna 2006). As regards topic (iii), the influence of Bolzano and Twardowski, another pupil of Brentano’s, was decisive.

Husserl took his PhD in mathematics in Vienna, with a thesis on the theory of variations (1883). After that he returned to Berlin, to become Weierstrass’ assistant for a short period of time. Husserl then went back to Vienna. After a brief military service he studied philosophy with Brentano, whose lectures on psychology and logic had a lasting impact on Husserl, as had his general vision of a strictly scientific philosophy (1884–6).

Husserl’s academic career continued in Halle, where he submitted his habilitation dissertation On the Concept of Number with Stumpf in 1887. That thesis was later incorporated in his first book, Philosophy of Arithmetic (PA), published in 1891, which is devoted to topic (i). Despite the high quality and originality of PA, Husserl had to wait for a long time before he got a professorship. He worked as a Privatdozent (an unpaid honorary office) at the University of Halle for fourteen years, during which he wrote his major work LI, which appeared in 1900/1 and was widely discussed immediately in the German-speaking world, especially due to Husserl’s attack on psychologism.

Thanks to LI, Husserl received an associate professorship in Göttingen in 1901, where he taught until 1916, when he went to Freiburg/Breisgau to become full professor. He retired in 1928. Husserl died on 27 April 1938 in Freiburg. His manuscripts (more than 40,000 pages in total) were rescued from Nazi-Germany by the Franciscan Van Breda, who brought them to Leuven (Belgium), where the first Husserl archive was founded in 1939. Since 1950 the Husserl archives are editing Husserl’s collected works, Husserliana (henceforth quoted as Hua, [volume number], [page]).

Philosophy of arithmetic

It is widely held that the position developed in PA represents a paradigm example of psychologism, the view according to which the laws of mathematics and logic depend on psychological laws of thinking, deriving from necessary conditions of, or even completely contingent empirical facts about, the human mind. However, the main aim of PA is conceptual clarification regarding the basic notions of arithmetic. (Frege, whose critical review of PA seems to constitute one of the causal factors that eventually led Husserl to turn against psychologism [Føllesdal 1958; cf. Patzig 1958: 131], must have been aware of this aim, as his letter to Husserl from 24 May 1891 indicates, where he even equates Husserl’s “concepts” to his predicative “senses”; see Mohanty 1982: 117ff. However, in his 1894 review Frege ignores this point.) Following Stumpf, Husserl is “guided by the methodological strategy” here that the “content of a concept” is to be clarified by investigating into its psychological origins, i.e. the lived experiences which occur when the concept develops in one’s own mind (Willard 2003: xvi f.).

It is far from clear how this approach is related to psychologism, as characterized above (p. 888). Mohanty has drawn a helpful distinction between what he calls “strong” and “weak psychologism” in this connection. Strong psychologism claims that logic is a branch of psychology, whilst so-called weak psychologism merely regards psychological inquiry (which would be descriptive psychological inquiry in Husserl’s case) as an indispensable means for conceptual basic research regarding logic (Mohanty 1982: 20). The author of PA certainly subscribes to the latter view. This leaves it an open question whether there is a sense in which he may look upon logical and mathematical laws as dependent on psychological ones.

In any case, PA is a masterpiece of descriptive psychology in the Brentanian tradition. (Somewhat ironically, then, Brentano did not hold Husserl in high esteem. As Thomas Binder, University of Graz, has pointed out to me, he did not even open the copy of PA that Husserl had sent him; thus, Husserl’s dedication to his teacher “with heartfelt gratitude” escaped him.) For instance, Husserl anticipates a central idea of Gestalt psychology here, the notion of a “Gestalt quality” (Ehrenfels 1890), which is expressed by the label “figural moment” in PA (Husserl arrived at his notion independently of von Ehrenfels):

One speaks, for example, of a a file of soldiers, of a heap of apples, of a row of trees, of a flight of birds, of a gaggle of geese, and so on. In each of these examples … there is expressed a certain characteristic property of the unitary total intuition of the [sensible] group, which can be grasped at one glance … . (Husserl 2003: 216; Hua: XII, 203f.)

Intuitions such as this, displaying a figural moment, entitle us to classify something as a sensible group (Menge) or collection of objects. The notion of a figural moment thus helps us to solve an epistemological problem not unlike the rule-following problem later discussed by Wittgenstein (in his Philosophical Investigations):

What enables us to know that the process of collection can be continued by only so much as a single step, that beyond what has in fact been colligated there still remains something more to be colligated? What enables us to know that a ‘total collection’ is to be intended? (Husserl 2003: 209f.; Hua: XII, 197)

By invoking the idea of a figural moment at this point, Husserl relates the formal concept of a group back to its conceptual roots in what he was later to refer to as (the perceptual dimension of) our everyday lifeworld (see the sixth section, “Prospects,” below). It is here that the psychological origin of our formal concepts is to be found, according to the author of PA; and it is with reference to that origin that such concepts are to be clarified and their application is to be epistemically justified, in the final analysis. Accordingly, he repeatedly stresses the close relationship between the contents of arithmetical thought and speech, on the one hand, and the practical interests of everyday life, on the other, criticizing Frege’s definition of the concept of number for neglecting that relationship, while conceding, importantly, that it yields the right extension (Husserl 2003: 122, 128; Hua: XII, 116, 122).

Husserl regards the intuition of a group of n objects as such by means of a figural moment as an “inauthentic,” symbolic representation of that group, where he follows Stumpf in holding that an “authentic” (re)presentation of such a group is only possible for n 12 (Husserl 2003: 202; Hua: XII, 192). The distinction between authentic and inauthentic representation is inspired by Brentano (see Husserl 2003: 205n1; Hua: XII, 193), and it continues to play a crucial role in Husserl’s phenomenological epistemology as developed in LI (and elsewhere). In PA he writes:

If a content is not directly given to us as that which it is, but rather only indirectly through signs which univocally characterize it, then we have a symbolic representation of it instead of an authentic one. We have, for example, an authentic representation of the outer appearance of a house when we actually look at the house; and we have a symbolic representation when someone gives us the indirect characterization: the corner house on such and such side of such and such street. (Husserl 2003: 205; Hua: XII, 193)

This conception is similar to Bertrand Russell’s distinction between knowledge by acquaintance vs. knowledge by description underlying (the epistemological part of) his theory of definite descriptions (Russell 1917) and it is remarkable that in his review of PA, Frege, whose view on the sense of proper names is sometimes associated with that theory, particularly recommends the chapter where Husserl presents the conception in question as containing valuable insights (if mainly psychological ones). Descriptive-psychologically, and thus conceptually, the relation of collective unity obtaining between the members of a group cannot be reduced to any other relation, such as similarity between those members. (Quite the contrary: in order to determine such similarity one must already presuppose the collective unity in question.) To justify this and many other theses, Husserl invokes what Brentano has called “inner experience,” a kind of introspection or inner perception (Husserl 2003: 69; Hua: XII, 66).

Further examples of symbolic representation include cases of multiplying and exponentialization. Thus, to quote Husserl’s example, “43” symbolically represents (s. r.) “4×4×4,” which s. r. “(4×4)×4,” which s. r. “(4+4+4+4)+(4+4+4+4)+(4+4+4 +4)+(4+4+4+4),” where “4” in turn s. r. “1+1+1+1” (Husserl 2003: 197; Hua: XII, 187). In this manner, arithmetical concepts can be traced back, regarding both their psychological origin (the way they are formed) and the ultimate justification of their application, to simple additions, i.e. acts of collecting units into sums, which acts are understood to be authentic representations of small groups of objects with at most a dozen members (see above, p. 890). Furthermore, a descriptive psychological analysis such as this obviously serves to clarify the corresponding arithmetical concepts. In addition, it makes it clear how symbols function as non-authentic surrogates for complex arithmetical operations, thereby enabling us to reason in an economical way.

The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for the concepts referring to the “numbers (Zahlen),” i.e. the concrete forms of groups containing a cardinal number (Anzahl) of units, the arithmetical operations in question operate upon. Thanks to “certain instrumentalities,” to be studied in semiotics, notably “those of enumerating and calculating, i.e., certain ‘mechanical’ operations, as it were, the true basis for which lies in the elemental relations between the numbers,” these concepts can be applied with ease in a wide range of cases (Husserl 2003: 95; Hua: XII, 90; also see Husserl 2003: 436, where an algorithm is described as “a blind mechanism” of symbols that “can replace and spare us logical thinking”; see Hua: XII, 394). Note that Husserl regards cardinal numbers, which he also refers to as “abstract forms of multiplicities,” as types whose instances are “numbers” in the sense of “determinate forms of multiplicities,” where “multiplicities” denotes concrete groups or collections of objects (Husserl 2003: 87; Hua: XII, 83). Thus, for example, he thinks of the cardinal number three as a type, or general concept, which is tokened by the individual form of a group of, say, three birds as such, i.e. by the individual feature that distinguishes this group from a concrete collection of four birds. “1+3=4” then means: quite generally, if we unite a single object and a group of objects instantiating (by its form) the cardinal number three, the resulting collection is a group instantiating the cardinal number four (Husserl 2003: 191f.; Hua: XII, 181f.).

When claiming that psychological description helps to clarify concepts, in the way just illustrated, Husserl does not have in mind traditional definitions, which must not be circular. For Husserl, circular explanations of concepts are perfectly acceptable as long as they shed light on the structure “of the phenomena upon which the abstraction of [the respective] concept rests” (Husserl 2003: 22; Hua: XII, 21). We also have to keep in mind this credo when turning to Husserl’s platonistic theory of thought content as developed in LI (see the fifth section, “Logical Investigations,” below). However, that theory, and indeed the whole point of the phenomenological method introduced in LI, can only be understood properly against the background of his conception of intentional object and reference, which took shape in the 1890s, particularly in the key text “Intentional Objects” (IO) from 1894 (Husserl 1994: 345–78). It is to this conception that we now turn.

Intentional objects

The problem discussed in IO is an antinomy Husserl refers to as “the paradox of objectless representations.” He borrows the term “objectless representations” from the great Bohemian philosopher, logician and mathematician Bernard Bolzano, the study of whose major work Theory of Science (1837) helped him (along with other pupils of Brentano’s) to free himself from the influence of his Viennese teacher. By “representations” he means what Bolzano refers to as “objective representations” or “representations in themselves,” i.e. the objective meaning contents of “subjective representations” like, for instance, the mental phenomena of “having something in mind” underlying the use of names (general or singular terms), which phenomena he also calls “nominal” subjective representations. According to Bolzano, these meaning contents are not to be confused with the real objects, if any, the relevant mental phenomena are directed at; for there are subjective representations lacking a corresponding object, such as your thought of a golden mountain. The objective meaning content of such a representation is called “objectless.”

Objective representations that are not objectless play a crucial role in Bolzano’s “logic of variation,” whose central notion, called derivability, is defined (in §155 of Theory of Science [1972]) as a relation in which one or more propositions (what Bolzano calls “sentences in themselves”), the conclusions C, stand to one or more propositions, the premises P, with respect to one or more variable representations in themselves R, if and only if every collection (“Inbegriff”) of representations in themselves put in the place of the representations R that makes true all premises P also makes true all conclusions C; where it is understood that the representations replacing R are not objectless. For instance, the conclusion that Kant is male is derivable from the premise that Kant is a bachelor, provided that we regard the objective representation Kant as variable. For, regardless of which representation we put in the place of Kant, we shall always obtain a true conclusion, given only that the representation in question is not objectless (otherwise the resulting conclusion is false, according to Bolzano).

While Husserl found the ontological status of objective representations completely mysterious until he read R. Hermann Lotze’s 1874 Logic (Lotze 1989a, b; see fifth section, below), he had no doubt that Bolzano was right in holding that they serve an important function in mediating our mental and linguistic reference to objects. This mediating relationship he called “representation.” Here, then, is the paradox.

(1) Every (objective) representation represents an object.

(2) There are objectless representations, ones which have no object they represent.

This even goes for propositions and the “states of affairs” they represent when functioning as propositional thought contents:

One can say that every proposition, even the false or perhaps absurd, represents a state of affairs (Sachverhalt) as its “object,” and nevertheless there is not for each proposition a corresponding state of affairs. An invalid proposition represents a state of affairs which does not exist, does not subsist. (Husserl 1994: 346; Hua: XXII, 304)

However, Husserl confines his explicit discussion of the problem to nominal (objective) representations. In this area, proposition (2) is supported by examples like “a round square,” “the present King of France” and “(the centaur) Cheiron” (to quote Husserl’s examples).

Husserl begins by criticizing two solutions to the problem proposed in a treatise from 1894 (Twardowski 1977) by Kasimir Twardowski, another pupil of Brentano’s, notably what might be called (i) the mental image theory and (ii) the immanent object theory of (objectless) representation.

Ad (i) According to the mental image theory, meaning contents represent intramental pictorial representations of objects. Like other pictures, such images may exist without there being a depicted object in the actual world. Where proposition (1) is about depiction, (2) concerns depicted objects.

Husserl raises three forceful objections against this proposal. First, he argues that it is a theoretical construction lacking a sufficient descriptive-psychological basis:

I would like to be introduced to those “mental images” which are supposed to reside in the concepts Art, Literature, Science, and the like … I would also like to meet the mental images of objects thought in absurd representations; and, again, those that come before the mathematician in reading a treatise filled with complicated systems of formulae. Veritable cyclones of phantasms must play themselves out in his consciousness. (Husserl 1994: 347; Hua: XXII, 305)

Secondly, he observes that the mental image theory merely shifts the problem it is supposed to solve: The mental image represented is said to always exist, so (1) will be true, or so the theory has it; all right, but how can (2) be true on this assumption? The only option for the mental image theorist at this point is to make a “duplication” of objects represented by postulating that in the veridical case, i.e. when there is an actual object corresponding to the representation, we are dealing with two represented objects, the mental image as well as the extra-mental referent. However, this alleged solution flies in the face of our common conception of objectual reference:

The same Berlin which I represent also exists, and the same would no longer exist if judgement fell upon it as upon Sodom and Gomorrah. (Husserl 1994: 347; Hua: XXII, 305f.)

Finally, the mental image theory already presupposes what an adequate conception of pictorial representation is yet supposed to accomplish: an explanation of what it is that makes the underlying “phantasy content,” or phantasm, “the [r]epresenting image of something or other” (Husserl 1994: 348; Hua: XXII, 306). It is precisely an objective representation that does the trick here (as in all cases of representation), according to Husserl, in a way to be explained in more detail (see the fifth section, below). Consequently, the idea of mental imaging is unhelpful when it comes to explaining the sense in which a given objective representation represents an object, which is exactly what a solution to the paradox of objectless representations would amount to.

Ad (ii) Another proposed such solution, not unlike the first one, and to be found in Brentano (at least on one reading of his notion of “intentional inexistence”), draws upon the distinction between “true” vs. “intentional,” alias “immanent,” existence; where a representation is supposed to have an “immanent object” even if the representation is objectless in Bolzano’s sense of the term. In the latter case, the immanent object is said to exist “merely intentionally”; its “true” existence can be truthfully denied.

Husserl objects that this proposal makes the same “false duplication that also doomed the image theory” (Husserl 1994: 350; Hua: XXII, 308):

The immanent object can … be none other than the true object in the cases where truth corresponds to the representation … Whether we merely represent Berlin, or judge it to be existing, in either case we are dealing with Berlin itself. (Ibid.)

The immanent object theorist might answer that this observation does not prove the distinction between immanent and true existence to be illegitimate. In fact, what else could it be whose true existence we affirm or deny, as the case may be, if not an object that in some sense, i.e. “immanently,” exists?

This sort of reply has been nicknamed “Plato’s beard” (Quine). Husserl criticizes it by pointing out, among other things, that it forces us to concede “the existence of any and every absurdity,” such as a round square, since the corresponding objective representations do exist (Husserl 1994: 352; Hua: XXII, 310). In this context, it is notable that in 1902 Husserl planned to send a copy of IO to Alexius Meinong (Hua: XXII, 456n1), whose “theory of objects” seems to lead to consequences of precisely the sort that Husserl warns against (cf. Hua: XXII, 458, note in the margin and 310, lines 35ff.).

Now to Husserl’s own solution. He crops Plato’s beard in the style of a classic analytical philosopher, by rephrasing sentences (1) and (2) in such a way that their alleged conflict vanishes. He argues that “merely intentional objects” talk, based on the fact that there are representations lacking a (“true”) object they represent, must not be taken literally; on his view, this would be just as illegitimate as the classification “of objects into determinate and indeterminate” ones on the ground that representations like “a lion” do not represent determinate objects – which surely has no tendency to show that there are “indeterminate lions running around in the world” (Husserl 1994: 354; Hua: XXII, 313). What is indeterminate is the representation (the meaning content), not the represented objects. Similarly, it is representations that we actually classify when we talk about “true” vs. “merely intentional objects.” The attribute “merely intentional” modifies the meaning of “object,” just as the attribute “painted” modifies the meaning of “fish” (Twardowski’s example). By making explicit the intended literal meaning of sentences involving an alleged (successful) reference to merely intentional objects, this reference gets eliminated, such that the paradox of objectless representations becomes resolved, as follows:

(1') For every representation R there is an assumption A such that: if A were true, there would be an object that R represents.

(2') It is not the case that for every representation R there is an object that R represents.

Examples for the kind of assumptions referred to in (1') include the implicit assumptions underlying our talk about fictional characters (“In Greek mythology, the centaur Cheiron exists”) and the existential assumptions on which a given system of geometry rests (“Granted that there is a space, a manifold of such-and-such a determinate type (exactly defined in the principles), then in it there exist these and those structures, for which these and those propositions hold true”; see Husserl 1994: 368; Hua: XXII, 328).

According to Husserl, we normally leave such assumptions implicit, as the respective “circumstances” automatically bring it about that they are taken for granted. Thus, “[i]t is obvious [selbstverständlich] that whoever judges about mythological objects places himself upon the grounds of the myth, without actually claiming it for himself” (Husserl 1994: 358; Hua: XXII, 317). Our talk about such objects is therefore elliptical; “taken literally and [properly],” the sentences employed (e.g. “the centaur Cheiron exists”) are false (ibid.).

The same goes for our corresponding thoughts. Here as elsewhere, particularly in science and mathematics, we often think in an elliptical or abbreviated manner, thus conforming to the principle of the “economy of thought” formulated by Ernst Mach (whose 1886 [1897] Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations Husserl studied while preparing his Habilitationsschrift), without which “science as an achievement of human thought is not intelligible,” on Husserl’s view (Husserl 1994: 365; Hua: XXII, 324). Notice that this principle also plays a significant role in Husserl’s theory of symbolic representation, as sketched in PA (see third section, “Philosophy of Arithmetic,” above, headword: symbolic representation of number); and it continues to do so in later writings, especially in LI (but see Husserl 2001: 123–33; Hua: XVIII, 196–213, where Husserl distances himself from Mach and Avenarius).

So Husserl subscribes to an informed common sense view of intentional, i.e. represented, objects (a view sometimes labeled as “direct realism”), combining it with a conception of objective representation deriving from Bolzano. In LI, Husserl develops the latter conception further, while still adhering to the conception of intentional objects presented in IO – claiming in no uncertain terms that:

It need only to be stated to be acknowledged that the intentional object of a presentation is the same as its actual object, and on occasion as its external object, and that it is absurd to distinguish between them … If the intentional object exists, the intention, the reference, does not exist alone, but the thing referred to exists also. (Husserl 2001a: 127; see also ibid.: 97ff., 125ff.; Hua: XIX/1, 384–9, 436–40)

This further development would eventually lead to a philosophical conception of objects as “constituted” in intentional consciousness, a conception that is anything but naive, despite the fact that it has the same extension as the common sense view (see sixth section, below, headword: phenomenological reduction).

Logical Investigations

The two volumes of LI were published in 1900/01 (second, revised edition 1913). The official goal Husserl pursues in this work is to develop a general theory of inferential systems, which (following Bolzano) he conceives of as a theory of science, on the ground that every science (including mathematics) can be looked upon as a system of propositions that are interconnected by a set of inferential (logical) relations. Following John S. Mill, he argues that the best way to study the nature of such propositional systems is to start with their linguistic manifestations, i.e. (sets of) sentences and (assertive) utterances thereof.

The first volume of LI contains Husserl’s attack against psychologism, whereas the (much larger) second volume consists of six “descriptive psychological” and “epistemological” investigations into (I) expression and meaning, (II) universals, (III) the formal ontology of parts and wholes (mereology), (IV) the “syntactical” and mereological structure of meaning, (V) the nature and structure of intentionality as well as (VI) the interrelation of truth, intuition and cognition. Husserl now adheres to a version of platonism that he derived from ideas of Bolzano and Lotze, where he embeds platonism about meaning and mental content in a theory of intentional consciousness. In his Theory of Science, Bolzano draws a sharp distinction between subjective

representations, objective representations and represented objects (see fourth section, “Intentional Objects,” above), regarding which he holds the following six theses (Beyer 1996: 95–115).

(T1) For every subjective representation there is an objective representation grasped in that representation, its “matter” or “stuff” (Stoff).

(T2) The matter of a subjective representation is different from the object(s) represented by that representation.

(T3) The matter of a subjective representation is its meaning content.

(T4) Two subjective representations are alike if and only if they share the same matter; where likeness entails that the respective representations are composed in the same way out of the subjective representations they contain as parts, if any, such that the matter of any of these components is a part of the common matter of the two representations in question.

(T5) The object(s) represented by a subjective representation whose matter is not objectless are identical to the object(s) represented by its matter.

(T6) The matter of a subjective representation mediates its objectual reference in that it uniquely determines the object(s) represented, i.e., two subjective representations sharing that matter are thus bound to represent the same object(s), if any.

And accordingly for judgments, their propositional contents (“sentences in themselves”) and the objects judged about (Beyer 1996: 116–30).

As it became clear, at least partially, in the fourth section, above, Husserl subscribed to all of these theses as early as in 1894. However, he was dissatisfied with the lack of positive explanation, in Bolzano, of what the subjective “grasping” of an objective representation, or proposition (sentence in itself), consists in. Here, Lotze’s identification of meaning contents with Platonic ideas, in the sense of types that can (but need not) be psychologically tokened, or instantiated, by “thinking” (Beyer 1996: 146f.), filled the bill for him. He writes:

[a] If, like all earlier readers of Bolzano, his ‘propositions in themselves’ previously [notably before studying Lotze; CB] appeared to me as mythical entities, suspended between being and non-being, it then became clear to me, with one stroke, that here we basically have a quite obvious conception which traditional logic did not adequately appreciate. I saw that under “proposition in itself” is to be understood what is designated in ordinary discourse – which always objectifies the Ideal – as the “sense” (“Sinn”) of a statement. It is that which is explained as one and the same where, for example, different persons are said to have asserted the same thing. Or, again, it is what, in science, is simply called a theorem, e.g., the theorem about the sum of the angles in a triangle, which no one would think of taking to be someone’s lived experience of judging.

[b] And it further became clear to me that this identical sense could be nothing other than the universal, the species, which belongs to a certain Moment present in all actual assertions with the same sense, and which makes possible the identification just mentioned, even where the descriptive content of the individual lived experiences (Erlebnisse) of asserting varies considerably in other respects. The proposition thus relates to those acts of judgement to which it belongs as their identical meaning (Meinung) in the same way, for example, as the species redness relates to individuals of “the same” red color.

[c] Now with his view of things as a basis, Bolzano’s theory, that propositions are objects which nonetheless have no “existence,” comes to have the following quite intelligible signification: – They have the “Ideal” being (Sein) or validity (Gelten) of objects which are universals (“allgemeiner Gegenstände”) … But they do not have the real being of things, or of dependent, thing-like [dinglichen] Moments [better: moments of things; CB] – of temporal particulars in general. (Husserl 1994: 201f.; Hua: XXII, 156f.)

Some explanations are in order (for the following see Beyer 1996: 154–71). By an “ideal” object, as opposed to a “real” one, Husserl understands an object (i.e. a logical subject of predications which are literally true) that is “atemporal (unzeitlich),” in the sense that it lacks temporal location. Hence, he regards any object as either ideal or real. Ideal objects can be subdivided further into ideal particulars, e.g. cardinal numbers (but see below, p. 902), and ideal universals, such as number concepts (which are said to become instantiated by particular numbers). It is ideal universals that Husserl equates with Bolzanian propositions in section [b] of the foregoing passage, characterizing them as “species, which belong […] to a certain moment present in all actual assertions with the same sense.”

What kind of “moment” is meant here? Husserl mentions in [b] that the moment in question belongs to the “descriptive content” of the subjective representation or, more generally, the lived intentional experience whose matter (as Bolzano would call it) is instantiated by that moment. In LI, the descriptive content of an intentional experience is defined as the collection of all “concrete or abstract parts” of the experience. By a “concrete” or “independent part,” also named a “piece” of a given whole, or collection, w, Husserl understands a part of w whose existence does not stand or fall with – a part which is not “founded in” – w. By contrast, the terms “abstract part,” “dependent part” and “moment” designate parts which are not pieces, whose existence stands or falls, in other words, with the existence of the relevant whole. (These mereological notions are further defined in the third of the LI, where you also find the definition of the notion of foundation given near the end of this section. Some of these notions are already to be found in Stumpf and made use of in PA.)

The elements of an intentional experience’s descriptive content are laid bare in what Husserl calls the “descriptive psychological analysis” of the experience, which involves something like inner experience (inner perception) à la Brentano, brought about by psychological reflection performed from the subject’s own first-person perspective (introspection). These elements then serve “as our exemplary basis for acts of [i]deation,” yielding “ideal [s]pecies of experiencing of differing levels of generality, and ideally valid truths of essence which apply a priori, and with unlimited generality, to possible experiences of these species” (Husserl 2001a: 112; Hua: XIX/1, 412). Among those ideal species is the meaning content of the experience, i.e. the representation or sentence in itself building its matter.

The first step to lay bare this meaning content consists in describing the experience’s “distinguishable parts and aspects” (ibid.), i.e. its reflectively available pieces and moments. These include a moment that is responsible for the fact that the subject is inclined to describe under which aspects he represents the object(s) his experience is directed at in a certain manner, with those aspects manifesting themselves both in the formulation he would make use of to this end, which makes clear how the object(s) are symbolically represented, and in what he would regard as an authentic representation of the object(s) represented, i.e. what would count as an “intuitive fulfillment” of that symbolic representation (see the first paragraph of the sixth section, below).

It is this element of the experience’s descriptive content that constitutes the “exemplary basis” for the second step of the process, which step Husserl refers to as ideation; the descriptive moment in question he sometimes calls the moment of matter (Materiemoment) of the experience under (descriptive psychological) investigation. This idea is missing in Bolzano (while a similar idea can be found in Lotze). Husserl describes the ideation of meaning content on the exemplary basis of a given moment of matter in the following passage:

The relation between the meaning and the significant expression (or its “meaning-tincture”) [in the sense of an according lived experience, or rather its moment of, matter CB] is the same as the relation, e.g., between the Species Red and a red object of intuitive experience (or the “moment” of red which appears in this object). When we mean Red in specie, a red object appears before us, and in this sense we look towards the red object to which we are nevertheless not referring. The moment of red is at the same time emphasized in this object, and to that extent we can again say that we are looking towards this moment of red. But we are not referring to this individually definite trait in the object, as we are referring to it when, e.g., we make the phenomenological observation that the moments of red in the separate portions of the apparent object’s surface are themselves separate. While the red object and its emphasized moment of red appear before us, we are rather “meaning” the single identical Red, and are meaning it in a novel conscious manner, th[r] ough which precisely the Species, and not the individual, becomes our object. The same would apply also to a meaning in its relation to an expression, and an expression’s meaningful orientation, whether this expression relates to a corresponding intuition or not. (Husserl 2001: 237; Hua: XIX/1, 111f.)

If we follow Husserl’s instruction from the last sentence of this quotation, we get a characterization of the ideation of a given meaning m, according to which it can be thought of as a subjective representation directed at m that is founded in a reflection upon another intentional experience and especially its moment of matter (which is in the reflection’s focus of attention), such that this moment of matter is particularly “emphasized in” the lived experience reflected upon. Now while that experience appears along with its moment of matter, we are, when performing the relevant ideation, neither “meaning” (having in mind) the experience itself nor its moment of matter, but rather the ideal species instantiated (tokened) by that moment of matter. This ideal species coincides with the meaning content m of the experience the reflection underlying the described ideation is directed at, its matter in Bolzano’s sense of the term.

If the moments of matter of two lived experiences instantiate one and the same ideal meaning species, then we “may say …, and with good sense,” that we are dealing with “the same presentation, memory, expectation, perception” or the like on both sides (Husserl 2001a: 123; Hua: XIX/1, 432). Husserl basically seems to have in mind here what is asserted in Bolzano’s above theses (T3) and (T4) (and in their counterparts for judgments and other sorts of intentional experience). However, Bolzano does not explain the likeness of two experiences sharing the same meaning contents by construing the latter as ideal species of a certain sort, whilst Husserl contends that “wherever things are ‘alike’, an identity in the strict and true sense of the term is also present”; after all, he argues, we “cannot predicate exact likeness of two things without stating the respect in which they are … alike,” thus relating it to an ideal species (Husserl 2001: 242; Hua: XIX/1, 117f.).

Both thinkers agree, though, that a given meaning content does not depend, for its existence, on its being instantiated in thought. As Husserl puts it:

[T]he ideal unities of pure logic, … its concepts, propositions, truths, or in other words, … its meanings … are an ideally closed set of general objects, to which being thought or being expressed are alike contingent. (Husserl 2001: 233; Hua: XIX/1, 110)

Thus, true propositions like the Pythagorean theorem can be discovered. For Husserl, the ideal species in question must therefore be conceived of along the lines of Lotze’s conception of ideas, i.e. as something that can but need not be thought (see above p. 897); where Husserl understands “being thought” in the sense explained in his species-theory of meaning content, i.e. in terms of the instantiation of the respective meaning content by an element of a particular thought’s descriptive content: its moment of matter.

It is in this sense that Husserl states, in section [b] of the passage we started from, that “the proposition … relates to those acts of judgement to which it belongs as their identical meaning (Meinung) in the same way, for example, as the species redness relates to individuals of ‘the same’ red color.” And accordingly for the relationship between objective and subjective representations (Hua: XXVI, 33f.). Note that in both cases it is, strictly speaking, the moment of matter rather than the complete intentional experience that instantiates the ideal meaning. In short: x is an ideal meaning if and only if it is possible that there is an intentional experience whose moment of matter is an instance (token) of x. In cases where this kind of possibility is realized, Husserl refers to the ideal meaning as the (ideal) matter of the respective experience. He holds that:

[a] Identical matters can never yield distinct objective references[; but [b] different matters can indeed yield the same objective reference]. (Husserl 2001a: 122; the second sentence is omitted in the translation by Findlay; see Hua: XIX/1, 430)

In section [a] Husserl asserts a generalized version of Bolzano’s thesis (T6). In [b] he states that the converse does not hold true; a thesis we also find in Bolzano. His argument demonstrates just how fine-grained his descriptive-psychological, or epistemic (see the first paragraph of sixth section, below), identity criteria for ideal meaning contents are (an issue he and Frege discussed in their correspondence; see the appendix in Mohanty 1982: 122–5):

The ideas equilateral triangle and equiangular triangle differ in content, though both are directed, and evidently directed, to the same object: they present the same object, although ‘in a different fashion’. The same is true of such presentations as a length of a+b units and a length of b+a units; it is also true of statements, in other respects synonymous, which differ only in [such] “equivalent” concepts. (Husserl 2001a: 121; Hua: XIX/1, 429)

Because descriptive psychological analysis yields ideal species, it involves what Husserl calls ideation (see above p. 989). In later works he would speak of “eidetic reduction” in this regard, construing it as an unfolding of abstract features shared by appropriate sets of fictitious or real-life examples, by way of free imaginative variation on an arbitrarily chosen initial example (for the method of “free variation,” see Experience and Judgement, §87).

Descriptive psychological analysis also yields the “moment of quality” of the intentional experience under investigation, i.e. the particular feature instantiating its psychological mode (judgment, deliberation, desire, hope, etc.), which roughly corresponds to the speech act mode of an utterance “giving voice to” that experience. (The intentional experience given voice to by a speaker A in an utterance u of an expression e is the conscious state, or lived experience, s such that (i) A performs u in order to present himself as being in, or undergoing, s and (ii) the respective meaning expressed by e as employed in u is identical with the intentional content of s; where p coincides with the general meaning function of e just in case that e is not an essentially occasional expression.) Husserl gives the following example:

The two assertions “2×2=4” and “Ibsen is the principle founder of modern dramatic realism” are both, qua assertions, of one kind; each is qualified as an assertion, and their common feature is their judgement-quality. (Husserl 2001a: 119; Hua: XIX/1, 426)

Furthermore, descriptive psychological analysis yields relations of “foundation” i.e. one-sided or mutual relative existential dependencies between (1) the intentional experience (alias “act”) in question and other experiences and (2) the particular descriptive features of the act. Thus, to quote one of Husserl’s examples for dependencies of type (1), an experience of pleasure about a given event is one-sidedly founded, relative to the “stream of consciousness” (to use a term Husserl adopted from William James) it belongs to, in a particular belief-state, or judgment, to the effect that this event has occurred. (The relativization to a particular stream of consciousness makes sure that both founded and founding experience occur in the same person’s mind.) Like all foundation relations, this one holds in virtue of an essential law, to the effect that conscious pleasure about some state of affairs requires a corresponding (and simultaneous) belief. Quite generally, a given object a of type F is founded in a particular object b of type G (where a is different from b and F is different from G) relative to a particular whole c of type H if and only if (i) there is an essential law in virtue of which it holds that for any object x of type F there is an object y of type G and a whole z of type H, such that both x and y are (proper) parts of z, and (ii) both a and b are (proper) parts of c (Husserl 2001a: 25–8; Hua: XIX/1, 267–72). This definition also allows for foundation relations of type (2), which hold between elements of an act’s descriptive content (notably, with respect to that act itself). In particular, Husserl claims with regard to an act’s respective moment of matter and quality that:

[A]ct-quality is undoubtedly an abstract aspect of acts, unthinkable apart from all matter. Could we hold an experience possible which was a judging without definite [matter]? This would take from the judgement its character as intentional experience, which is evidently part of its essence.

The same holds of matter. A matter that was not matter for presentation, nor for judgement, nor for … etc. etc., would be held to be unthinkable. (Husserl 2001a: 122; Hua: XIX/1, 430)

In his critique of psychologism, Husserl draws upon the above-described Platonic conception of meaning content (among many other things, he raises about eighteen objections in total; see Soldati 1994: 117ff.). He compares the platonistic ontology of logic with that of mathematics and particularly arithmetic. In the latter regard, he argues that while arithmetical concepts can be clarified by recourse to their “psychological origin” only (just as he held in PA), the mathematical principles containing these concepts are nevertheless far from being psychological laws. For, the “domain of research” of arithmetic “is completely and exhaustively determined by the familiar series of ideal species 1, 2, 3, …” (Husserl 2001: 109f.; Hua: XVIII, 173f.):

In this sphere there can be no talk of individual facts, of what is temporally definite … The number Five is not my own or anyone else’s counting of five, it is also not my presentation or anyone else’s presentation of five. It is in the latter regard a possible object of acts of presentation, whereas, in the former, it is the ideal species of a form whose concrete instances are found in what becomes objective in certain acts of counting, in the collective whole that these constitute. (Ibid.)

Note that Husserl still subscribes to his analysis of number concepts as presented in PA (see third section, above). However, he now particularly stresses the atemporal character of cardinal numbers and the fact that they are instantiated by certain moments of particular collections. (This makes it difficult to understand, though, why Husserl wants to classify cardinal numbers as ideal particulars rather than as universals; see above, p. 898.) As we have seen already, he also ascribes this atemporal and universal character to the objects with which logic is concerned, i.e. representations and sentences in themselves. Now why, Husserl asks, should the laws of logic be psychological ones, if the laws of arithmetic, which concern ideal species as well, clearly do not qualify as psychological?

Where Husserl’s species-theory of meaning content is based upon a descriptive psychological approach, it is thus nevertheless strictly anti-psychologistic in its orientation. But does it allow for a decent analysis of the concept of ideal meaning content? The answer depends on what demands such an analysis is supposed to meet. If what we are after is a traditional (non-circular) concept-definition in the form of logically necessary and sufficient conditions, then Husserl’s proposal fails, for it is circular. After all, it explains ideal meaning content as what is instantiated by a certain element of the descriptive content of a given intentional experience whose ideal matter coincides with that very meaning content. But then, just like the author of PA (see the third section, above), the author of LI has in view a rather different kind of conceptual analysis:

Logical concepts, as valid thought-unities, must have their origin in intuition: they must arise out of an ideational intuition founded on certain experiences, and must admit of indefinite reconfirmation, and on recognition of their selfidentity, on the reperformance of such abstraction. Otherwise put: we can absolutely not rest content with “mere words,” i.e. with a merely symbolic understanding of words … [W]e must go back to the “things themselves” …

The phenomenology of the logical experiences aims at giving us a sufficiently wide descriptive … understanding of these mental states and their indwelling sense, as will enable us to give fixed meanings to all the fundamental concepts of logic. (Husserl 2001: 168; Hua: XIX/1, 10)

Prospects

Much more could be said about the content and philosophical significance of Husserl’s LI. Thus, to pick up the thread of the foregoing quotation, an interesting and still largely unexplored claim defended particularly in the sixth of the LI (which in many respects continues the approach taken in PA) is the following:

Any logically consistent meaning can in principle be subjectively fulfilled, more or less adequately, by a unified intuition (authentic representation), such as an act of continuous perception or intuitive imagination, where the structure and other essential features of the meaning in question can be read off from the respective mode of intuitive fulfillment.

Inconsistent meanings can be singled out and studied by means of (reflection upon) corresponding experiences of intuitive conflict, like for instance the discrete switching back and forth between a duck-head-imagination and a rabbit-head-imagination in the case of an attempted intuitive imagination of a duck-head that is at the same time a rabbit-head. Some meanings are inconsistent for formal-logical reasons. According to Husserl, all analytically false propositions belong to this category. (It should be noted that regarding the question of what is distinctive of this category, Husserl did not improve on the pioneering results arrived at by Bolzano and Frege; nor did he intend to do so.) Other meanings are inconsistent because they conflict with some general material a priori truth, also called “essential law.” The proposition expressed by the sentence “There are perceptual objects whose surface is both (visibly) completely green and completely red at the same time” is a case in point (although some members of the Vienna Circle were to take issue with this contention).

As for the species-theory of meaning content developed in LI, Husserl seems to have been aware that it faces at least one serious objection. It concerns utterances of “essential occasional” (Husserl), i.e. systematically context-sensitive, expressions like “I am here now” and the (as one could call them) indexical experiences they give voice to. If the meaning content of an indexical experience is to serve as a (sub-)propositional content, it must uniquely determine the object (if any) that the respective experience refers to. That is to say: if two indexical experiences display the same meaning content, they must refer to the same object (if any). It seems, though, that the moments of matter of two such experiences can instantiate the same ideal matter – the same type of (particular) content – whilst representing different objects. If you and I both think “I am here,” our respective thoughts share the same type of content, or so it would seem, but they represent different states of affairs.

In order to accommodate this observation, Husserl draws a distinction (in the first of his LI) between, on the one hand, the “general meaning function” of an utterance (which corresponds to what is called “character” in recent semantics, roughly: the linguistic meaning of the expression used) and, on the other hand, the “respective meaning” (i.e. the propositional or sub-propositional content expressed in the relevant context of utterance).

However, it is doubtful whether this distinction really helps Husserl to overcome the difficulty the phenomenon of context-sensitivity (which he considered to be ubiquitous in our empirical thought and speech; see Husserl 2001: 7; Hua: XVIII, 13) poses for his species-theory of content. If intentional contents are ideal matters in the sense of types of particular moments of matter, and if this kind of type may remain constant while the intentional object and hence the (sub-)propositional content differs, then surely intentional contents thus conceived cannot always function as (sub-)propositional contents, as Husserl’s theory would have it. Rather, there must be another intentional content involved, namely the “respective meaning,” which serves as the (sub-)propositional content of the indexical experience. And this content does not appear to be an ideal species. (It may be argued, however, that even (sub-)propositional contents of indexical utterances can be instantiated multiply in thought and speech, thus qualifying as ideal species after all. But the crucial question is whether this holds true in complete generality: consider the above example “I am here now.”)

Anyhow, Husserl construes (sub-)propositional contents (“respective meanings”) as two-factored, with the general meaning function plus the relevant context of utterance (if any) determining the content in question. And at least in the case of indexical experiences he seems to identify their meaning contents (intentional contents) with these two-factored contents, for he holds that meaning content uniquely determines the object referred to or represented (in the sense defined in [T6]; see the fifth section, above).

Because Husserl equates meaning content with respective meaning, he is committed to subscribe to a version of externalism about intentional content (pace Beyer 1996: 175–83; see Beyer 2000). After all, the respective meaning expressed depends on objects located in, or constituting, the relevant context of utterance, according to the author of LI, with these objects usually belonging to the external environment, e.g. to the perceptual surrounding of the speaker. And externalism can be looked upon as the view that the environment helps determine the intentional content. More particularly, it can be thought of as the claim that the actual referent (if any) helps determine the content in that the latter is dependent, for its very identity, on that referent – provided the lived experience in question is indeed successfully related to an intentional object belonging to the external environment.

Notice, however, that unlike most recent externalists, Husserl does not naively take the existence of an extra-mental referent for granted. Instead, he asks which structures of consciousness entitle us to represent the world as containing particular objects “transcending” what is currently given to us in experience. (It is in these structures of consciousness that the objects in question “constitute themselves.”) To achieve this, he introduces the method of “epoché” that requires the phenomenologist to systematically “bracket” his “natural attitude” towards the objects belonging to the real world and thus transcending our (empirical) consciousness. In order to prevent the misunderstanding that this method leads to a genuinely solipsistic conception of intentional consciousness, Husserl stresses that far from distracting our attention from these real, transcendent objects, the epoché is designed to enable us to make coherent sense, in terms of the essential “horizon-structure” of our consciousness, of that very reality and transcendence, i.e. to perform the “phenomenological reduction” (Hua: XIII, 432ff.). To this end, Husserl employs a research strategy in the theory of intentional content and reference that could be called his dynamic method:

Intentional states and experiences are looked upon as momentary components of certain transtemporal cognitive structures – dynamic intentional structures – in which one and the same object or state of affairs is represented throughout a period of time during which the subject’s cognitive perspective upon that object or state of affairs is constantly changing. (Hua: III/1, 196–9)

Typical examples of dynamic intentional structures include continuous observations, which represent Husserl’s standard example, as well as those totalities of successive judgments, or momentary belief-states, that actualize one and the same continuous belief. (For instance, my judgment that yesterday was Thursday actualizes the same belief as the judgment I could have given voice to yesterday by “Today is Thursday.”)

The dynamic method has us look upon noematic Sinn under the “functional aspect” (Husserl) of how it enables us to keep the intentional object “in mind (im Sinn)” (Hua: II/1, 196ff.), instead of viewing it merely statically as a psychological type or species to be instantiated by isolated moments of consciousness. It makes us regard any content of the latter sort, particularly “static perceptual content,” as a mere “abstraction from dynamic content” (Mulligan 1995: 195, 197).

Even objectless subjective representations of spatiotemporal individuals, such as hallucinations, display dynamic content, so that an intentional object appears to “constitute itself” in a dynamic intentional structure. This appearance is deceptive, though. If there is no real object, there can be no successful object-constitution. To be sure, there is still intentional content (and thus thought) even in this case. But the content is going to “explode” once we follow its “intentional implications” in that the horizon-structure it predelineates will eventually turn out to be incoherent (Hua: VIII, 434). As a consequence, the associated dynamic intentional structure will become deactivated. In this way, our cognitive system is constrained by the external environment, at least in the long run.

It should be stressed, though, that Husserl does not regard the external environment as independent from the essential structures of consciousness, with its associated criteria of coherence. In fact, the task of the phenomenological reduction is precisely to study the interdependence between these structures and the environment in a methodologically well-regulated manner.

To achieve this task, Husserl starts from a “solipsistic” abstraction of the notion of a perceptual object which differs from that notion in that it does not presuppose that any other subject can observe such an object from his own viewpoint. But then, the “the crucial further step” (Husserl) towards the phenomenological clarification of the interdependence in question consists in disclosing the dimension that opens up when the epistemic justification, or “motivation,” of intersubjective experience, or empathy, is additionally taken into account and made explicit (Hua: VII, 435).

It is worth noticing that Husserl’s concept of motivation is more general than the notion of epistemic justification in the traditional (“internalist”) sense of the term. His explanation of the concept of motivation runs as follows:

[H]ow did I hit upon that, what brought me to it? That questions like these can be raised characterizes all motivation in general. (Husserl 1989: 234, with translation change; Hua: IV, 222)

Husserl stresses that whenever an object exercises a motivating “stimulus” on a subject “comporting itself” (sich verhaltend) “toward the [o]bject,” then an intentional content of consciousness, a “noema,” is in play; the object is “immanently constituted” in the subject’s consciousness (Husserl 1989: 231; Hua: IV, 219). This even holds true for our practical copings with everyday objects, at least insofar as we are comporting ourselves to these objects as free agents. For, on Husserl’s view, the will of such an agent, on a given occasion, is always already embedded in a “volitional context” (Willenszusammenhang) predelineating, in the final analysis, the open “future horizon” of a “full individual life” that the agent is currently able to lead (Hua: XXXVI, 252), thus qualifying as a dynamic intentional structure.

The idea of the intersubjective constitution of objects belonging to our common everyday “lifeworld” is one of the many interrelated issues examined in his later works. The term “lifeworld” is employed in Husserl’s last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936/54 [1970]), to denote the way the members of one or more social groups (cultures, linguistic communities) use to structure the world into objects (Hua: VI, 126–38, 140–5). The respective lifeworld is claimed to “predelineate” a “world-horizon” of potential future experiences that are to be (more or less) expected for a given group member at a given time, under various conditions, where the resulting sequences of anticipated experiences can be looked upon as corresponding to different “possible worlds and environments” (Hua: III/1, 100). These expectations follow typical patterns, as the lifeworld is fixed by a system of (first and foremost implicit) intersubjective standards, or conventions, that determine what counts as “normal” or “standard” observation under “normal” conditions (Hua: XV, 135ff., 142) and thus as a source of epistemic justification. Some of these standards are restricted to a particular culture or “homeworld” (Hua: XV, 141f., 227–36), whereas others determine a “general structure” that is “a priori” in being “unconditionally valid for all subjects,” defining “that on which normal Europeans, normal Hindus, Chinese, etc., agree in spite of all relativity” (Hua: VI, 142). Husserl quotes universally accepted facts about “spatial shape, motion, sense-quality” as well as our prescientific notions of “spatiotemporality,” “body” and “causality” as examples (ibid.). These conceptions determine the general structure of all particular thing-concepts that are such that any creature sharing the essential structures of human consciousness will be capable of forming and grasping them, respectively, under different lifeworldly conditions. If you will, it is this universal “a priori” structure of the lifeworld that makes intercultural understanding possible (Hua: XV, 159).

On Husserl’s view, it is precisely the “subjective-relative” lifeworld that provides the “grounding soil” of the more objective world of science (Hua: VI, 134), in the twofold sense that (i) scientific conceptions owe their (sub-)propositional content and thus their reference to reality to the prescientific notions they are supposed to “naturalize” and that, consequently, (ii) when things get into flux in science, when a crisis occurs, all that is left to appeal to in order to defend new scientific approaches against their rivals is the prescientific lifeworld, as manifested in our according intuitive acceptances (for references see Føllesdal 1990: 139f.). This view offers an alternative to the “naturalistic” stance taken by many analytic philosophers today. Husserl’s notion of lifeworld should be of interest for contemporary discussions in philosophy of science and epistemology, such as the debate about “contextualist” approaches to knowledge and epistemic justification. However, a more detailed exploration of these issues goes far beyond the scope of an article about Husserl considered as a nineteenth-century philosopher.

Among the most notable of Husserl’s other later works are Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy – First Book (1913 [1982]; the second book is important, too [1989]), Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1928 [1990]), Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929 [1969]), Cartesian Meditations (1931 [1988]) and Experience and Judgement (1939 [1973]). In the first six decades of the twentieth century his thought had a particularly great impact on German and French philosophy. Members of the phenomenological school include Adolf Reinach, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger, Oskar Becker, Roman Ingarden, Alfred Schütz, Helmuth Plessner, Jean Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and many others. As this list of names indicates, Husserl’s work has influenced other disciplines, too, such as sociology, anthropology, linguistics and literary study. More recently, his ideas have been taken up in psychology (recent headwords include “embodied cognition,” “mindreading,” “[meta-]representation and consciousness,” “temporal awareness,” “attention,” among others).

Finally, there is a growing awareness among analytic philosophers that Husserl has anticipated, at least in part, many of their ideas (e.g. rigid designation, externalism and Twin Earth, the referential/attributive distinction, the distinction between content and character, cognitive dynamics, pre-predicative experience, make-believe and fictional operators, to cite but a few examples from the philosophy of language and mind). His ethics and conception of personhood, closely related to the notion of lifeworld, is still provocative. In any case, it ought to be clear that there is yet a lot to be learned from his challenging writings.

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30EDMUND HUSSERL