Philosopher, founder of the school of phenomenology, born in Prossnitz, EC Czech Republic. He studied mathematics at Berlin and psychology at Vienna, and taught at Halle (1887), Göttingen (1901), and Freiburg (1916). His two-volume Logische Untersuchungen (19001, Logical Investigations) defended the view of philosophy as an a priori discipline, unlike psychology, and in his Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologischen Philosophie (1913, trans Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology) he presented a programme for the systematic investigation of consciousness and its objects. His approach greatly influenced philosophers in Germany and the USA, particularly Heidegger, and gave rise to Gestalt psychology.
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Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy |
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| Edmund Husserl | |
| Name: | Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl |
| Birth: | April 8, 1859 (Prostějov, Moravia, Czech Republic) |
| Death: | April 26, 1938 (Freiburg, Germany) |
| School/tradition: | Phenomenology |
| Main interests: | Epistemology, Mathematics |
| Notable ideas: | Epoché, Natural Standpoint, Noema, Noesis, Eidetic Reduction |
| Influences: | Franz Brentano, Carl Stumpf, René Descartes, Gottlob Frege |
| Influenced: | Eugen Fink, Kurt Gödel, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, Immanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Rudolf Carnap, Alexandre Koyré |
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (April 8, 1859, Prostějov – April 26, 1938, Freiburg) was a German philosopher, known as the father of phenomenology.
Husserl was born into a Jewish family in Prostějov (Prossnitz), Moravia, Czech Republic (then part of the Austrian Empire). Husserl was a pupil of Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf; In 1887 Husserl converted to Christianity and joined the Lutheran Church.
Life and works
Husserl's studies and early works
Husserl initially studied mathematics at the universities of Leipzig (1876) and Berlin (1878), under Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker. Brentano so impressed Husserl that he decided to dedicate his life to philosophy. In 1886 Husserl went to the University of Halle to obtain his habilitation with Carl Stumpf, a former student of Brentano.
In these first works he tries to combine mathematics, psychology and philosophy with as main goal to provide a sound foundation for mathematics. In an example Husserl explains this in the following way: if you are standing in front of a house, you have a proper, direct presentation of that house, but if you are looking for it and ask for directions, then these directions (e.g. In other words, you can have a proper presentation of an object if it is actually present, and an improper (or symbolic as he also calls it) if you only can indicate that object through signs, symbols, etc. Husserl's 1901 Logical Investigations is considered the starting point for the formal theory of wholes and their parts known as mereology (Simons 1987).
Another important element that Husserl took over from Brentano is intentionality, the notion that the main characteristic of consciousness is that it is always intentional.
Gottlob Frege and Husserl's Anti-Psychologist Turn
It has been widely accepted by analytic philosophers and some historians that Edmund Husserl, as Brentano's disciple, began studying mathematics from a psychological point of view. Later, we know that he completely changed his mind, and that in the first volume of his Logical Investigations called "The Prolegomena of Pure Logic", he supported an anti-psychologist point of view of logic and mathematics. Most scholars point to the review that Gottlob Frege wrote against Philosophy of Arithmetic, which supposedly made Husserl change his mind completely to a Platonist point of view. This is also reinforced by the belief many have held that Husserl's notion of noema and object corresponds to Frege's notion of sense and reference. We can also find passages in Logical Investigation where Husserl makes a difference between meaning (sense) and object (reference). Rosado Haddock, among others, who have discovered that Husserl's change from psychologism to platonism had nothing to do with Frege's review. For example, the review falsely attributes Husserl that he subjectivizes everything so no objectivity is possible, and also falsely attributed to him a silly notion of abstraction where the objects disappear until we are left with the number (or at least with two ghosts). Contrary to what Frege states, already in Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic we find two different kinds of representations: a subjective representation and objective representation.
Furthermore, it seems that Husserl changed his mind about psychologism as early as 1890, shortly before his Philosophy of Arithmetic was published. Husserl stated that when his Philosophy of Arithmetic was published, he had already changed his mind. In his Logical Investigations, Husserl mentions Frege only twice, one of them in a footnote to point out that he retracted three pages of his criticim of Frege's The Foundations of Arithmetic, and the other one was to question Frege's use of the word Bedeutung to designate reference rather than meaning (sense).
About the difference of sense and reference, Frege thanked Husserl in a letter dated May 24, 1891 for sending him a copy of Philosophy of Arithmetic and Husserl's review of E. Schröder's Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik, and in that same letter, he takes Husserl's review of Schröder's book to compare both his and Husserl's notion of sense of reference of concept words. In other words, Frege did recognize, as early as 1891, that Husserl made the difference between sense and reference. The inevitable conclusion is that Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl, before 1891, independently reached a theory of sense and reference.
Others point to the fact that Husserl's notion of noema has nothing to do with Frege's notion of sense. For Husserl, noemata are necessarily fused with noeses which are the conscious activities of consciousness. Frege, on the other hand, did not conceive objects as forming part of senses, and if a proper name denotes a non-existent object, then it does not have a reference, hence concepts with no object as argument have no truth value. Also Husserl did not hold that predicate of sentences designate concepts. Husserl thinks that the reference of a sentence is a state of affairs. So, Husserl's notion of noema is totally unrelated to Frege's notion of sense, just as Husserl's notion of meaning and object is different from that of Frege.
Finally, a comparison between Husserl's conception of logic and mathematics differ from the one by Frege. While Frege supported the idea that arithmetic could be derived from logic, Husserl's position was that this is not the case.
Husserl's criticism of Psychologism
Psychologism in logic stipulated that logic itself was not an independent discipline, but a branch of psychology. Husserl, after his platonist turn, pointed out that the failure of anti-psychologists to defeat psychologism has to do with the fact that they were unable to distinguish between the theoretical side of logic (which tells us what is), and the normative side (which tells us how we ought to think). Anti-psychologists at that time conceived logic as being normative in nature, when pure logic does not deal at all with "thoughts" but about a priori conditions for any judgments and any theory whatsoever.
Since "truth-in-itself" has "being-in-itself" as ontological correlate, and psychologists reduce truth (and hence logic) to empirical psychology, the inevitable consequence is scepticism.
This confusion made by psychologism (and related disciplines such as biologism and anthropologism) can be due to three specific prejudices:
1. Husserl argues that logic is theoretical, i.e. that logic itself proposes a priori laws which are themselves the basis of the normative side of logic. Husserl states that this effort made by psychologists are a "μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος" (a transgression to another field). Husserl responds to it saying that truth itself as well as logical laws remain valid always regardless of psychological "evidence" that they are true.
From this criticism to psychologism, the distinction between psychological acts from their intentional objects, and the difference between the normative side of logic from the theoretical side, derives a platonist conception of logic.
Meaning and Object in Husserl
From Logical Investigations (1900/1901) to Experience and Judgment (published in 1939), Husserl expressed clearly the difference between meaning and object.
Husserl also identifies a series of words he calls "formal words" which are necessary to form sentences and have no sensible correlates. Every sentence must contain these formal words to designate what Husserl called "formal categories". Formal-ontological categories relate objects and they include these notions: set, cardinal number, ordinal number, part and whole, relation, and so on.
Through sensible intuition our consciousness constitutes what Husserl called a "situation of affairs" (Sachlage). So, for Husserl a sentence has a proposition or judgment as its meaning, and refers to a state of affairs which has a situation of affairs as a reference base.
Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics
Edmund Husserl held the belief that "truth-in-itself" has as ontological correlate "being-in-itself", just as meaning categories have formal-ontological categories as correlates. The discipline of logic is a formal theory of judgment, that studies the formal a priori relations among judgments using meaning categories. Mathematics, on the other hand, is formal ontology, it studies all the possible forms of being (of objects). So, in both of these disciplines, formal categories, in their different forms, are their object of study, not the sensible objects themselves. The problem with the psychological approach to mathematics and logic is that it fails to account for the fact that it is about formal categories, not abstractions from sensibility alone. The reason why we do not deal with sensible objects in mathematics is because of another faculty of understanding called "categorial abstraction".
Husserl criticized logicians of his time for not focusing on the relation between subjective processes that give us objective knowledge of pure logic. Logic's first stratum is what Husserl called a "morphology of meanings" which concerns only on the a priori way to relate judgments to make them meaningful. In this stratum we elaborate a "pure grammar" or a logical syntax, and he would call its rules "laws to prevent non-sense", which would be similar to what logic calls today "formation rules".
Logic's second stratum would be called by Husserl "logic of consequence" or the "logic of no-contradiction" which explores all possible forms of true judgments.
He also talked about what he called "logic of truth" which consists of formal laws of possible truth and its modalities, and is previous to the third logical third stratum.
Husserl recognized a logical third stratum, a meta-logical level, what he called a "theory of all possible forms of theories". Husserl finds as ontological correlate to this the "theory of manifolds" It is, in formal ontology, a free investigation where a mathematician can assign several meanings to several symbols, and all their possible valid deductions in a general and indeterminate manner.
This view of logic and mathematics accounted, according to him, for the objectivity of a series of mathematical development of his time, such as n-dimensional manifolds, whether Euclidean or non-Euclidean, Grassman's theory of extensions, and, among others, Rowan Hamilton's theories, Lie's theory of transformation groups, Cantor's set theory among others. first edition, 1900-1901) Husserl made some key conceptual elaborations which led him to assert that in order to study the structure of consciousness, one would have to distinguish between the act of consciousness and the phenomena at which it is directed (the object-in-itself, transcendent to consciousness).
From the Ideen onward, Husserl concentrated on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. The metaphysical problem of establishing the material reality of what we perceive was of little interest to Husserl (other than when he had to repeatedly defend his position of transcendental idealism, which did not at any point propose that there were no real material objects). Husserl proposed that the world of objects and ways in which we direct ourselves toward and perceive those objects is normally conceived of in what he called the "natural standpoint", which is characterized by a belief that objects materially exist and exhibit properties that we see as emanating from them. Husserl proposed a radical new phenomenological way of looking at objects by examining how we, in our many ways of being intentionally directed toward them, actually "constitute" them (to be distinguished from materially creating objects or objects merely being figments of the imagination); in the Phenomenological standpoint, the object ceases to be something simply "external" and ceases to be seen as providing indicators about what it is (a way of looking that is most explicitly delineated by the natural sciences), and becomes a grouping of perceptual and functional aspects that imply one another under the idea of a particular object or "type". The notion of objects as real is not expelled by phenomenology, but "bracketed" as a way in which we regard objects instead of a feature that inheres in an object's essence founded in the relation between the object and the perceiver. In order to better understand the world of appearances and objects, Phenomenology attempts to identify the invariant features of how objects are perceived and pushes attributions of reality into their role as an attribution about the things we perceive (or an assumption underlying how we perceive objects).
In a later period, Husserl began to wrestle with the complicated issues of intersubjectivity (specifically, how communication about an object can be assumed to refer to the same ideal entity) and tries new methods of bringing his readers to understand the importance of Phenomenology to scientific inquiry (and specifically to Psychology) and what it means to "bracket" the natural attitude. The Crisis of the European Sciences is Husserl's unfinished work that deals most directly with these issues. In it, Husserl for the first time attempts a historical overview of the development of Western philosophy and science, emphasizing the challenges presented by their increasingly (one-sidedly) empirical and naturalistic orientation. Husserl declares that mental and spiritual reality possess their own reality independent of any physical basis, and that a science of the spirit ('Geisteswissenschaft') must be established on as scientific a foundation as the natural sciences have managed:
It is my conviction that intentional phenomenology has for the first time made spirit as spirit the field of systematic scientific experience, thus effecting a total transformation of the task of knowledge.Professor Husserl was denied the use of the library at Freiburg as a result of the anti-Jewish legislation the National Socialists (Nazis) passed in April 1933. His former pupil and Nazi Party member, Martin Heidegger, informed Husserl that he was discharged. Heidegger (whose philosophy Husserl considered to be the result of a faulty departure from, and grave misunderstanding of Husserl's own teachings and methods) removed the dedication to Husserl from his most widely known work, Being and Time, when it was reissued in 1941. The philosophical relation between Husserl and Heidegger is discussed at length by Bernard Stiegler in the film The Ister.
In 1939 Husserl's manuscripts, amounting to approximately 40,000 pages of "Gabelsberger" stenography and his complete research library were smuggled to Belgium and deposited at Leuven to form the Husserl-Archives.
Philosophers influenced by Husserl
Hermann Weyl's interest in intuitionistic logic and impredicativity appears to have resulted from contacts with Husserl. Rudolf Carnap was also influenced by Husserl, not only concerning Husserl's notion of essential insight that Carnap used in his Der Raum, but also his notion of "formation rules" and "transformation rules" is founded on Husserl's philosophy of logic.
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