Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics

by Edmund Husserl, Dallas Willard

The primary intent of this volume is to give the English reader access to all the philosophical texts published by Husserl between the appearance of his first book, Philosophie der Arithmetik, and that of his second book, Logische Untersuchungen- roughly, from 1890 through 1901. Along with these texts we have included a number of unpublished manuscripts from the same period and dealing with the same or closely related topics. A few of the texts here translated (the review of Pahigyi, the five "report" articles of 1903-1904, the "notes" in Lalande's Vocabulaire, and the brief discussion. article on Marty of 1910) obviously fall outside this time period, so far as their publication dates are concerned; but in content they seem clearly confined to it. The final piece translated, a set of personal notes that date from 1906 through 1908, provides insight into how Husserl experienced his early labors and their results, and into how he saw their relation to work before him: a phenomenological critique of reason in all of its forms. Thus the texts here translated - which obviously are to be read in conjunction with his first two books - cover the progression of Husserl's Problematik from the relatively narrow one of clarifying the epistemic structure of general arithmetic, to the all-encompassing one of establishing in principle, through phenomenological research, the line between legitimate and illegitimate claims to know or to be rational, regardless of the domain concerned.

Genres: Philosophy, Logic

553 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1993

About the author

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (Dr. phil. hab., University of Halle-Wittenberg, 1887; Ph.D., Mathematics, University of Vienna, 1883) was a philosopher who is deemed the founder of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, believing that experience is the source of all knowledge, while at the same time he elaborated critiques of psychologism and historicism.

Born into a Moravian Jewish family, he was baptized as a Lutheran in 1887. Husserl studied mathematics under Karl Weierstrass, completing a Ph.D. under Leo Königsberger, and studied philosophy under Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. Husserl taught philosophy, as a Privatdozent at Halle from 1887, then as professor, first at Göttingen from 1901, then at Freiburg im Breisgau from 1916 until his 1928 retirement.

Reviews

[Kira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Breaking ground in the descriptive psychology of intentionality. Descriptions of the experience of intending run parallel to reviews of then-contemporary logic texts-- some of which are made to seem pretty silly by present lights, rather confirming Husserl's foresight.
The best part is the essay offering an intensional semantics for Schröder's formal language in Algebra der Logic (I think I got that title right). The paper shows by example that an extensional semantics is by no means necessary for a truly formal logic, and that extensional semantics (predicates map onto sets) has its own drawbacks for logic based on set-theoretic paradoxes (e.g. Russell's paradox).