Husserliana, Briefwechsel IX, pp. 128–29, tr. Engelen.
Compare this to Friedrich Steinle’s suggestion that it is far more common in the experimental sciences than Husserl seems to think.
On Foucault, see David Hyder’s contribution to this volume.
See Rheinberger’s and Gasché’s contributions to this volume.
See (Smith, 2006) and (2002b) on the unity of theory in Husserl’s Logical Investigations.
See (Smith, 2006) on Husserl’s theory of constitution and its background in the mathematical notion of a manifold and early mathematical logic, all relevant to Carnap’s program.
See (Smith, 2006) and (1995) on this perspectivist reading of Husserl’s transcendental idealism; see (Smith, 2006) and (Smith and McIntyre, 1982) on the reconstruction of Husserl’s theory of intentionality in a realist, perspectivist scheme aligned with logical-semantic theory.
(Carnap, 1928, § 5) following Friedman’s translation in (Friedman, 1999, 134), except for putting “constitution theory” for “constitutional theory.”
(Carnap, 1928, §§ 15–16, 66). See also (Friedman, 1999, 130) as well as (1999, 176).
Reprinted with permission of Acta Philosophica Fennica, originally published in 1990, in Language, Knowledge, and Intentionality—Perspectives on the Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka, Acta Philosophica Fennica 49:123–43. This article springs from a project on Husserl’s phenomenology on which I worked as a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, in 1989–90. I gratefully acknowledge this support.
Simmel conceives of the Lebenswelt as “aufgebaut” (constructed) and also writes that “das religiöse Leben schafft die Welt” (religious life creates the world) (1912, 12, my emphases). Hugo von Hofmannsthal used the term even earlier, in his introduction to the Insel edition of Thousand and One Nights (1908), where he wrote: “What would these poems be, what would they mean to us, if they did not emerge from a life-world. This life-world is incomparable, suffused with an infinite joyousness, ... that brings and binds everything together ...” (Was wären diese Gedichte, was wären sie uns, wenn sie nicht aus einer Lebenswelt hervorstiegen. Unvergleichlich ist diese Lebenswelt, und durchsetzt von einer unendlichen Heiterkeit, ... die alles durcheinanderschlingt, alles zueinanderbringt ... ) (von Hofmannsthal 1951, 319, tr. Hyder).
See (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, 108n), where he refers to the second volume of the Ideas. In the Preface (1945, vii), Merleau-Ponty mentions that he also has studied the manuscript of Husserl’s Crisis. See (van Breda, 1962), as well as David Carr’s English translation of the Crisis, p. xxx, notes 20 and 21, and (Sommer, 1990, 84n70).
See (Føllesdal, 1982, 553–69).
Letter quoted in (Kern, 1964, 276n).
Husserl, Preface to the Gibson translation of Ideas I. Here from (Husserliana V, 152.32–153.5), my translation.
This example came up in conversations with David Wellbery.
The manuscript dates from 1917 but was copied during the first half of the 1920s, and it is possible that the word Lebenswelt came in then.
I have changed Kersten’s translation slightly. See (Husserliana III, 158.13–19) for the original.
Again, the translation was slightly modified. See (Husserliana III, 161.15–18) for the original.
See, for example, (Crisis § 34e, § 36), (Husserliana VI, 134, 143, 462).
Carr’s translation, slightly amended. See (Husserliana VI, 143.29–30) for the original.
Husserl in slippers.
For references to these and other uses of the word style in this tradition, see the opening pages of my “ ‘Style’ for Historians and Philosophers” (Hacking, 1992, 1–20). My own theoretical use of the concept “style of scientific reasoning” is adapted from A. C. Crombie on “styles of scientific thinking,” much cited in my article. Geoffrey Lloyd, as quoted in the Primal Beginning section above, presumably wrote of “styles of mathematical reasoning” well aware of that discussion.
See his contribution to this volume.
(Wertheim, 2004).
The classic account is found in (Courant and Robbins, 1941) and many later editions.
I take the idea of a physicist’s tool kit from (Krieger, 1992). When I went to Google to check this reference, I typed in the words “physicist tool kit.” My first hit was The Official String Theory Web Site, which begins by answering the question “What is theoretical physics?” with an account of the calculus of variations, Euler and Lagrange.
Cf. note 2 above.
First published in Rodolphe Gasché, 2009, Europe, or The Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
This Husserlian caveat is important in many respects: It suggests, in particular, that the very attempt to found Europe upon the Greek idea of philosophy as universal science, and in terms of a universal community, cannot take place in a merely historical fashion. To invoke the tradition in this context, without questioning it critically, is to go against what the very idea of philosophy requires.
The naïveté of Greek philosophy is that of its objectivism, but, as Husserl points out, it is of a different kind than that of the modern sciences. See (“Ausdruck. Welt Sinn auflegen,” Husserliana XXIX, pp. 161–62).
“Beilage XXII. Ontologie der Lebenswelt, Ontologie der Menschen,” Husserliana VI, p. 483, my translation. See also, “Beilage XV. Das europäische Menschentum in der Krisis der europäischen Kultur. I,” Husserliana VI, p. 455.
For further distinction between imaginary ideality of the morphological type in the pre-geometrical life world and the ideality of pure geometry, see also (Derrida, 1978, 122–26, 133).
Husserl makes the distinction when he writes: “What arises first is the idea of continuation which is repeatable with unconditional generality, with its own self-evidence, as a freely thinkable and self-evident possible infinity, rather than the open endlessness [of “imperfect but perfectible subjective representations” of, for example, an individual thing]: rather than finite iteration, this is iteration within the sphere of the unconditional ‘again-and-again,’ of what can be renewed with ideal freedom” (Crisis, Appendix V, p. 346).
For the connection between idealization, objectification, and method, see (Crisis, Appendix V, p. 348).
In the appendix to the Crisis on The Origin of Geometry, it is made clear that the very formal-logical self-evidence of all the geometrical propositions that Galileo inherited relieved him from the need to reactivate the actual, that is, the truth-meaning, of geometry (Origin of Geometry, pp. 366–67).
For a discussion of the notion of the abstract in Husserl, see (Kuhn, 1968, 117).
Indeed in The Vienna Lecture, Husserl asserts that in the mathematics of antiquity “was accomplished the first discovery of both infinite ideals and infinite tasks. This becomes for all later times the guiding star of the sciences” (The Vienna Lecture, p. 293). For a discussion of this apparent contradiction, see (Derrida, 1978, 127). He writes: “Despite the closedness of the system, we are within mathematical infinity because we have definitively idealized and gone beyond the factual and sensible finitudes. The infinite infinity of the modern revolution can then be announced in the finite infinity of Antiquity’s creation” (130).
Is it necessary to point out that Husserl’s account, in the Crisis, of the birth of the new sciences, in which, for example, the discussion of Galileo dominates at the expense of equally important, and perhaps from a historical perspective, more important figures, is not intended as a history of the sciences or a mundane history of ideas? Indeed, historians of the sciences may object to this privilege accorded to Galileo. Furthermore, they may argue that Galileo’s real accomplishment does not consist in the mathematization of nature but in the discovery of the relativity of movement and rest. But the history developed in Part II of the Crisis is a history executed in a transcendental-phenomenological attitude, as Elisabeth Ströker notes, that is, “a limine history within the frame of the already presupposed phenomenological epoche” (Ströker, 1979, 113). Husserl’s inquiry into the ways Galilean science, which he construes as the completion of the efforts of various thinkers, such as Vieta, who preceded him, and in which the name Galileo does not primarily refer to the historical figure but serves as a designation for an epochal state of mind, is one into “the way of thinking which motivates the idea of the new physics” (Crisis, § 9b), its presupposed self-evidences, and “undetermined general anticipations a priori” (Crisis, § 9c)—in short, into the subjective processes of this creation. Husserl writes: “Our concern is to achieve complete clarity on the idea and task of a physics which in its Galilean form originally determined modern philosophy, [to understand it] as it appeared in Galileo’s own motivation, and to understand what flowed into this motivation from what was traditionally taken for granted and thus remained an unclarified presupposition of meaning, as well as what was later added as seemingly obvious, but which changed its actual meaning” (Crisis , § 9e). Thus Husserl can conclude that “in this connection it is not necessary to go more concretely into the first beginnings of the enactment of Galileo’s physics and of the development of its method” (ibid.). Inquiring into the intentional structures and the original evidences that constituted the new scientific spirit, the mathematization of nature appears as the very precondition on the basis of which experimentation, as well as the discovery of the relativity of movement and rest, acquire their scientific significance in the first place. To claim that Husserl misrepresents Galileo’s achievement misses out on the thrust of Husserl’s analysis, the philosophically innovative aspects of his account of the fundamental evidences constitutive of the modern sciences.
The point has been made in “Self-Responsibility, Apodicticity, Universality” (Gasché, 2004), and which is included, together with the present essay, in (Gasché, 2009), on the idea of Europe within the phenomenological tradition of philosophy.
Holding that the sciences and their history are grounded in the life-world does not amount to relativizing them “in the sense of a social or just epistemological constructivism.” As Hans-Jörg Rheinberger has argued, Husserl’s aim in grounding the sciences in the life-world is the establishment of a “historical epistemology” (as opposed to pure history of science), an aim that shows Husserl in the proximity of the work of Ludwik Fleck. See (Rheinberger, 2007, 19–21) as well as his contribution to this volume.
Husserl writes: “the perfection-limit of the secondary qualities is not measurable; it is only ‘intuitable.’ But it is intersubjectively determined and determinable through relation to the mathematical limits of the primary characteristics” (Crisis, Appendix II, p. 310).
Paul Ricoeur also remarks that in spite of its genius, Galileo’s “working hypothesis, for lack of self-criticism, is not recognized [by Galileo] as the audacity of spirit at work. Soon this ‘indirect mathematization of nature’ could verify itself only by the success of its extension, without which the circle of hypothetical anticipation and unending verification could never be broken, for every enigma of induction is inscribed within this circle” (Ricoeur, 1967, 163).
Let us also point out that if the natural sciences achieve compelling apodicticity regarding the idealized spatio-temporal shapes by grounding them logically, it is to be assumed that in the case of idealities that are no longer of the order of bodily shapes, their universal reconstructability may have to have recourse to other than logical means.
Husserliana XXIX, p. 178, my translation.
For several valuable comments I would like to thank an anonymous referee and Christian Bermes.
Seeking for an origin also has a religious dimension, because it means returning to the point where everything started, to a source of truth, to a point when nothing had been distorted or falsified. David Carr also points this out in his contribution to this volume, when he mentions that phenomenology is related to a return to innocence, to an unfalsified experience.
I am grateful to Kevin Mulligan for pointing this out.
All of the philosophically relevant origins finally serve as a basis for critical thinking.
“Und in unserem Alter einen möglichen Modus des Daseins zu erfinden, nachdem der ganze Boden einem unter den Füßen weggezogen ist, ist eine harte Sache. Das verbraucht viel seelische Kraft, und um damit fertig werden zu können, muß ich mit einer gewaltigen Überkraft philosophischer Konzentration dagegen aufkommen können—und darum dieser äußerste Kampf um die Gestaltung des letzten Werkes” (Husserliana, Briefwechsel, IX, pp. 128–29; translated by Hyder).
“Ich muß doch schließlich, wenigstens vor mir selbst, rechtfertigen können, daß ich in der deutschen Philosophie (also auch in dieser Nation) kein Fremdling bin, und daß alle die Größen der Vergangenheit, die ich so sehr verehrt habe und deren Gedanken in den meinen in neuen Gestalten wuchsen, mich unbedingt mitrechnen mußten, als echten Erben ihres Geistes, als Blut von ihrem Blute” (Husserliana, Briefwechsel, IX, pp. 128–29; translated by Engelen).
See for example (Foucault, 1990).
Compare for this point the chapters of David Carr and Ulrich Majer in this volume.
Ulrich Majer mentions this for Greek mathematics as well in his chapter in this collection.
See (Crisis, § 9d, 9h).
This is quite different with Homer, for whom experience is a bodily process.
“How is it that precisely through the epoché a primal ground of immediate and apodictic self-evidences should be exhibited? The answer is: If I refrain from taking any position on the being or non-being of the world, not every ontic validity is prohibited for me within this epoché. I, the ego carrying out the epoché, am not included in this realm of objects but rather ... am excluded in principle. I am necessary as the one carrying it out. It is precisely herein that I find just the apodictic ground I was seeking, the one that absolutely excludes every possible doubt” (Crisis, § 17).
“And yet, as soon as one took into account that (the exact sciences) are the accomplishments of the consciousness of knowing subjects, their self-evidence and clarity were transformed into incomprehensible absurdity. No offence was taken if, in Descartes, immanent sensibility engendered pictures of the world; but in Berkeley this sensibility engendered the world of bodies itself ” (Crisis, § 24).
“The life-world can be disclosed as a realm of subjective phenomena which have remained ‘anonymous’ ” (Crisis, § 29).
hoi d’ hama* pantes eph’ hippoiin mastigas aeiran,
peplêgon th’ himasin*, homoklêsan t’ epeessin
essumenôs: hoi d’ ôka* dieprêsson pedioio
(365) nosphi neôn tacheôs*: hupo de sternoisi koniê
histat’ aeiromenê hôs te nephos êe thuella,
chaitai d’ errôonto*meta pnoiêis anemoio+.
harmata d’ allote men chthoni pilnato pouluboteirêi,
allote d’ aïxaske metêora: toi d’ elatêres
(370) hestasan en diphroisi, patasse de thumos hekastou
nikês hiemenôn: keklonto de hoisin hekastos
hippois, hoi d’ epetonto koniontes pedioio.
Then they all at one moment lifted the lash each above his yoke of horses, and smote them with the reins, and called to them with words, full eagerly and forthwith they sped swiftly over the plain [365] away from the ships and beneath their breasts the dust arose and stood, as it were a cloud or a whirlwind, and their manes streamed on the blasts of the wind. And the chariots would now course over the bounteous earth, and now again would bound on high; and they that drove [370] stood in the cars, and each man’s heart was athrob as they strove for victory; and they called every man to his horses, that flew in the dust over the plain (Homer, 1925, 23.362–71; translated by Samuel Butler).
I wish to thank David Hyder, Skúli Sigurdsson, and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments and suggestions.
It should be mentioned that in this point, Bachelard’s attitude is far more complicated.
For an early and lucid evaluation of this paper, see Jacob Klein, “Phenomenology and the History of Science” (1940).
See David Hyder’s contribution to this volume.
See Derrida’s lengthy introduction to his translation of “The Origin of Geometry,” L’Origine de la géométrie, itself translated as (Derrida, 1978).
Originally published in 2003 in Perspectives on Science 11 (1):107–29. My thanks to Ian Hacking, Alan Paskow, Alan Richardson, Holger Sturm, and Dieter Teichert for comments on earlier versions of this paper.
See Norris’s criticisms of Rorty’s interpretation of Foucault in (1994, 162–66).
One need only think of Wittgenstein’s repeated criticisms of Principia Mathematica, according to which the inadequacy of Whitehead’s and Russell’s theory of logic is made evident by their repeated introduction of supplementary, supposedly logical axioms. Wittgenstein’s definition of a “tautology” is supposed to provide an independent criterion for distinguishing properly logical propositions; however, his definition presupposes a closed set of bivalent elementary propositions.
See Cavaillès’s 1938 monograph, Méthode axiomatique et formalisme (1981, 165–69).
See, for instance, (Gutting, 1989, 9–12.) Gutting takes this passage as his point of departure for a discussion of the theories and methodologies of Bachelard and Canguilhem. Without in any way calling into question the value of his approach (for he rightly emphasizes Foucault’s debts within the French tradition of the history of scientific concepts), I am obviously more skeptical of the accuracy of Foucault’s description. Put otherwise, while Gutting follows Foucault in viewing this French tradition as an alternative response to Kant’s question “What is Enlightenment?” I am claiming in this essay that Foucault was not able to engage in this alternative critique without covertly borrowing from the transcendental larder. Quite evidently, Foucault’s relation to his teachers is far more important when one considers the specific “archaeologies” that he develops.
Reprinted as (Foucault, 1994b, 764–65). This article is a redaction of the original version of the preface Foucault had provided for the English translation of Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological.
“Husserl always regretted that an expression that truly captured the aim of philosophy was already in the possession of a positive science, namely the expression: archaeology” (Fink, 1939, 246).
Who is to be called a structuralist and who not is of course a heated question at this time. Let me just use the term loosely to refer to Foucault, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson, and others at the time who drew on Saussure’s work in linguistics.
The gap between a subject’s immediate grasp of language and the unknown history of that language that Merleau-Ponty takes as the departure for his discussion in (Merleau-Ponty, 1960) is first raised by Hendrik Pos in an article appearing in the Revue internationale de philosophie (1939). This issue is dedicated to Husserl, and it contains the first printing of Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, as well as (Fink, 1939), the article Cavaillès refers to when he describes phenomenology as a kind of archaeology. The concluding paragraphs of Pos’s article, in which he stresses the fundamental role of self-consciousness (that is to say, of immediate subjective knowledge) for the possibility of the human sciences (his example is linguistics), are an interesting foil to Foucault’s later insistence that the human sciences depend on the historically contingent notion of “Man.”
See my discussion of Frege and Wittgenstein above, as well the passages on logicism in (Cavaillès, 1981, 165–66).
(Cavaillès, 1960, 78). Au moins l’évidence justificatrice de l’analyse transcendantale est-elle nécessairement unique: s’il y a conscience des progrès, il n’y a pas progrès de la conscience. Or l’un des problèmes essentiels de la doctrine de la science est que justement le progrès ne soit pas augmentation par juxtaposition, l’antérieur subsistant avec le nouveau, mais révision perpétuelle des contenus par approfondissement et rature.
(Cavaillès, 1960, 78). Il n’y a pas une conscience génératrice de ses produits, ou simplement immanente à elles, mais elle est chaque fois dans l’immédiat de l’idée . . . . Le progrès est matériel ou entre essences singulières, son moteur l’exigence de dépassement de chacune d’elles. Ce n’est pas une philosophie de la conscience mais une philosophie du concept qui peut donner une doctrine de la science. La nécessité génératrice n’est pas celle d’une activité, mais d’une dialectique.
Some readers may feel that this scheme of Husserl’s is top-heavy. It should be said in his defense, however, that any rational reconstruction implicitly involves the notion of an internal history of concepts that is both distinct of empirical history all while it reveals the true meaning of the latter. That Husserl and Lakatos are obviously inspired by Hegel in this regard may give analytic philosophers reason to reject both of them. But analytic philosophers are just as committed to the notion of “rational history” as was Hegel, and indeed Russell’s influential history of Western philosophy was also directly influenced (some might use a stronger term) by Hegel’s. Conversely, one cannot very well hope to eliminate such rational historical elements from a history of knowledge in order to do “non-presentist” history of science. As always, Husserl is trying to identify the presuppositions that are involved in a rational investigation of this sort, that is to say, our implicit stance toward past reason.
“Dans une philosophie de la conscience ou la logique est transcendantale, ou elle n’est pas” (1960, 26).
Some readers may object that Kant has no intention of justifying the principles of logic, but that for him the latter are beyond justification precisely because they are transcendental. It is true that he does not aim to justify his (i.e., our human) logic in the sense of showing it preferable to some alternative. But the critical philosophy does justify the sciences of logic and mathematics in another sense: It guarantees their future validity for our reasoning concerning the empirical world. One can of course restrict the a priori to its constitutive role, thereby “relativizing” it in Reichenbach’s sense. But the resulting philosophy, while Kantian, is no longer the philosophy of Kant.
(Cavaillès, 1981, 90–93). See also the detailed commentary of (Sinaceur, 1994, 55–66).
Cf. (Cavaillès, 1936), quoted and discussed in (Sinaceur, 1994, 108–110).
“Si, par la suite, Foucault n’utilise plus le concept d’a priori historique, peut-être encore trop évocateur de la phénoménologie, c’est sans doute pour avoir pris conscience non de l’inutilité de l’entreprise, mais de ses limitations. A la fin il l’évoquait, mais de manière programmatique seulement ....” (Colette, 1998). I am indebted to Professor Colette for providing me a copy of his unpublished manuscript.
I would like to thank the Thyssen Foundation (Cologne, Germany) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) for generously supporting this research.
(Smith and Medin, 1981), (Prinz, 2002), (Gurova, 2003), for example.
(Heilbron, 1979) still provides the best overview of electricity of that period.
(Heilbron, 1979) chapter 9, gives a brief account of Dufay’s research. Dufay’s eight “Mémoires” at the Paris Académie between 1733 and 1737 provide the main source; cf. also his own English summary (Dufay, 1734). Electricity here always means, of course, what we nowadays call static electricity.
“... me déconcerta prodigieusement” (Dufay, 1733b).
He mentioned many of them in his “Histoire de l’électricité” (Dufay, 1733a).
“die Erfahrung hat uns gelehrt, dass die electrische Kraft von einer zwiefachen Art sey ...” (Musschenbroek, 1739). Cf. the German translation (Musschenbroek and Gottscheden, 1747, 242).
(Winkler, 1745, 5), (Musschenbroek and Gottscheden, 1747, 242), (Gralath, 1747, 208). The latter work is a huge and most comprehensive (natural and chronological) “History of Electricity,” which most later historians of electricity, from Priestley to our time, like to use as a source.
For the notion of exploratory experimentation, see, e.g., (Steinle, 2003).
In recent history of science, by contrast, there is increasing attention to the notion of facts and their historical development, see, e.g. (Shapiro, 2000).
My translation.
See (Origin of Geometry, pp. 360–68).
Thanks to the remark of an anonymous referee, I became aware that Husserl sees processes of sedimentation constantly taking place in everyday language as well. This makes the problem of his account of the “descriptive sciences” and of how their language might already be affected by processes of sedimentation even sharper. As far as I see, he does not provide an elaborated account. My interpretation may well go further than the textual evidence can sustain, but its contrasting image provides a background for developing a more differentiated view of Husserl.
See Ian Hacking’s remarks on “Galileo’s mathematization of nature” in his contribution to this volume.