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Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (April 8 1859, Prostějov – April 26 1938, Freiburg) was a German philosopher, known as the father of phenomenology. His work broke away from the purely positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, giving weight to subjective experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena.
Life and worksHusserl's studies and early worksHusserl initially studied mathematics at the universities of Leipzig (1876) and Berlin (1878), under Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker. In 1881 he went to Vienna to study under the supervision of Leo Königsberger (a former student of Weierstrass), obtaining the Ph.D. in 1883 with the work Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung ("Contributions to the Calculus of Variations"). In 1884, he began to attend Franz Brentano's lectures on psychology and philosophy at the University of Vienna. 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. Under his supervision he wrote Über den Begriff der Zahl (On the concept of Number; 1887) which would serve later as the base for his first major work the Philosophie der Arithmetik (Philosophy of Arithmetic, 1891). In these first works he tries to combine mathematics, psychology and philosophy with as main goal to provide a sound foundation for mathematics. He analyzes the psychological process needed to obtain the concept of number and then tries to build up a systematical theory on this analysis. To achieve this he uses several methods and concepts taken from his teachers. From Weierstrass he derives the idea that we generate the concept of number by counting a certain collection of objects. From Brentano and Stumpf he takes over the distinction between proper and improper presenting. 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. the house on the corner of this and that street) are an indirect, improper presentation. 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).
Gottlob Frege and Husserl's Anti-Psychologist TurnIt has been suggested by some analytic philosophers that Edmund Husserl after obtaining his PhD in mathematics, began analysing the foundations of mathematics from a rather psychological point of view, as Brentano's disciple. In his professorship doctoral dissertation called "On the Concept of Number" (1886) and his Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) Husserl enhanced the approach taken by Weierstrass and other mathematicians of the time in defining the natural numbers by counting with Brentano's methods of descriptive psychology. Later, when attacking the psychologistic point of view of logic and mathematics in the first volume of his Logical Investigations called "The Prolegomena of Pure Logic", he appears to reject much of his early work, though the forms of psychologism analysed and refuted in the Prolegomena do not apply directly to his Philosophy of Arithmetic. While some scholars point to Gottlob Frege's negative review of the Philosophy of Arithmetic, this did not turn Husserl towards Platonism, as he had already discovered the work of Bernhard Bolzano around 1890/91 and explicitly mentions Bolzano, Leibniz and Lotze as inspirations for his newer position. The Frege industry routinely informs us that the review quite transformed poor Husserl's philosophy; but elementary attention to chronology and sources (Hill 1991a, pt. 1) shows that this claim refers far more to the False than to the True. Likewise the opinion that Husserl's notion of noema and object is due to Frege's notion of sense and reference is anachronistic, as already in Husserl's review of Schröder a clear distinction is made between sense and reference and in Husserl's criticism of Frege in the Philosophy of Arithmetic he remarks on the distinction between content and extension of a concept. The distinction between the subjective mental act, the content of a concept and the (external) object was developed independently in the School of Brentano and might have surfaced as early as Brentano's 1870's lectures on logic. Philosophers and scholars such as J. N. Mohanty, Claire Ortiz Hill and Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock, among others, have discovered and explained repeatedly that Husserl's change from psychologism to platonism had nothing to do with Frege's review.[1] For example, the review falsely attributes to Husserl the view that he subjectivizes everything so no objectivity is possible, and also falsely attributed to him a notion of abstraction whereby 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. Objectivity is clearly stated in that work. Frege's attack seems rather to be addressed at the ides on the foundations of mathematics current in the Berlin School of Weierstrass, of which Husserl and Cantor, however, can not be said to be orthodox representatives. Furthermore, from various sources it is quite clear that Husserl changed his mind about psychologism as early as 1890, a year before his Philosophy of Arithmetic was published. Husserl stated that when it was published, he had already changed his mind. In fact, he says that he had doubts about psychologism from the very beginning. He attributed his change of mind to Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Bernard Bolzano, Rudolf Hermann Lotze, and David Hume.[2] He makes no mention of Frege as being decisive for the change. 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. Also, noemata have three different levels: the substratum, which is never presented to consciousness and is the supporter of all the properties of the object; the noematic senses, which are the different ways the objects are presented to us; and modalities of being (possible, doubtful, existent, non-existent, absurd, and so on). Hence, in intentional activities, even non-existent objects can be constituted, and form part of the whole noema. 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. Also, for Frege, the reference of a sentence is a truth value. 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 Frege's. While Frege supported the idea that arithmetic could be derived from logic, Husserl's position was that this is not the case. For him, mathematics (with the exception of geometry) is logic's ontological correlate, they are both sister disciplines, but none of them is reducible to the other. Husserl's criticism of PsychologismPsychologism 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. Besides, also psychologists have not been so successful in trying to see how from induction or psychological processes we can justify the absolute certainty of logical principles, such as the principles of identity and non-contradiction. Therefore, it is futile to base certain logical laws and principles on uncertain processes of the mind. This confusion made by psychologism (and related disciplines such as biologism and anthropologism) can be due to three specific prejudices: 1. The first prejudice is thinking that logic somehow is normative in nature. 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. Since mathematics is related to logic, he showed an example with mathematics. If we have a formula like (a+b)(a-b)=a²-b² does not tell us how to think mathematically. It just expresses a truth. A proposition that says: "The product of the sum and the difference of a and b should give us the difference of the squares of a and b" does express a normative proposition. This normative statement is based on the theoretical statement "(a+b)(a-b)=a²-b²". 2. For psychologists, the acts of judging, reasoning, deriving, and so on, are all psychological processes. Therefore, it is the role of psychology to provide the foundation of these processes. Husserl states that this effort made by psychologists are a "μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος" (a transgression to another field). It is a μετάβασις because psychology cannot possibly provide any foundations for a priori laws which themselves are the basis for all the way we should think correctly. Psychologists have the problem of confusing intentional activities with the object of these activities. It is important to distinguish between the act of judging and the judgment itself, the act of counting and the number itself, and so on. Counting five objects is undeniably a psychological process, but the number 5 is not. 3. Judgments can be true or not true. Psychologists argue that judgments are true because they become "evidently" true to us. This evidence, a psychological process that "guarantees" truth, is indeed a psychological process. Husserl responds to it saying that truth itself as well as logical laws remain valid always regardless of psychological "evidence" that they are true. No psychological process can explain the a priori objectivity of these logical truths. 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. This means that we should regard logical and mathematical laws as being independent of the human mind, and also an autonomy of meanings. It is essentially the difference between the real (everything subject to time) and the ideal or irreal (everything that is atemporal), such as logical truths, mathematical entities, mathematical truths and meanings in general. Meaning and Object in HusserlFrom Logical Investigations (1900/1901) to Experience and Judgment (published in 1939), Husserl expressed clearly the difference between meaning and object. He identified several different kinds of names. For example, there are names that have the role of properties that uniquely identify an object. Each of these names express a meaning and designate the same object. Examples of this are "the victor in Jena" and "the loser in Waterloo", or "the equilateral triangle" and "the equiangular triangle", in both cases, both names express different meanings, but designate the same object. There are names which have no meaning, but have the role of designating an object: "Aristotle", "Socrates", and so on. Finally, there are names which designate a variety of objects. These are called "universal names", their meaning is a "concept" and it refers to a series of objects (the extension of the concept). The way we know sensible objects is called "sensible intuition". Husserl also identifies a series of words he calls "formal words" which are necessary to form sentences and have no sensible correlates. Examples of formal words would be "a", "the", "more than", "over", "under", "two", "group", and so on. Every sentence must contain these formal words to designate what Husserl called "formal categories". There are two kinds of categories: meaning categories and formal-ontological categories. Meaning categories relate judgments; they include forms of conjunction, disjunction, forms of plural, among others. Formal-ontological categories relate objects and they include these notions: set, cardinal number, ordinal number, part and whole, relation, and so on. The way we know these categories is through a faculty of understanding called "categorial intuition". Through sensible intuition our consciousness constitutes what Husserl called a "situation of affairs" (Sachlage). It is a passive constitution where objects themselves are presented to us. To that situation of affairs, through categorial intuition, we are able to constitute a "state of affairs" (Sachverhalt). One situation of affairs through objectual acts of consciousness (acts of constituting categorially) can serve as the basis for constituting multiple states of affairs. For example, let's suppose a and b are two sensible objects in a certain situation of affairs. We can use it as basis to say, "a<b" and "b>a", two judgments which designate different states of affairs. 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 MathematicsEdmund 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". Through this faculty we are able to get rid of sensible components of judgments, and just focus on formal categories themselves. Thanks to "eidetic intuition" (or "essential intuition"), we are able to grasp the possibility, impossibility, necessity and contingency among concepts or among formal categories. Categorial intuition, along with categorial abstraction and eidetic intuition, are the basis for logical and mathematical knowledge. Husserl criticized logicians of his time for not focusing on the relation between subjective processes that give us objective knowledge of pure logic. All subjective activities of consciousness needs an ideal correlate, and objective logic (constituted noematically) as it is constituted by consciousness needs a noetic correlate (the subjective activities of consciousness). He stated that logic has three strata, each further away from consciousness, and further away from psychology. 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". Mathematics, as logic's ontological correlate, also has a similar stratum of "morphology of formal-ontological categories". 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 includes here syllogistic classic logic, propositional logic and that of predicates. This is a semantic stratum, and the rules of this stratum would be the "laws to avoid counter-sense" or "laws to prevent contradiction". They are very similar to today's logic's "transformation rules". Mathematics also has a similar stratum which is based among others on pure theory of pluralities, and a pure theory of numbers. They provide a science of the conditions of possibility of any theory whatsoever. 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". It explores all possible theories in a priori fashion, rather than the possibility of theory in general. We could establish theories of possible relations between pure forms of theories, investigate these logical relations and the deductions from such general connection. The logician is free to see the extension of this deductive, theoretical sphere of pure logic. 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. It is properly speaking the most universal mathematics of all. Through the posit of certain indeterminate objects (formal-ontological categories) as well as any combination of mathematical axioms, mathematicians can explore the apodeictic connections between them just as long as consistency is preserved. 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. The Elaboration of PhenomenologySome years after the publication of his main work, the Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations; 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). Knowledge of essences would only be possible by "bracketing" all assumptions about the existence of an external world. This procedure he called epoché. These new concepts prompted the publication of the Ideen (Ideas) in 1913, in which they were at first incorporated, and a plan for a second edition of the Logische Untersuchungen. 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 despite being a transcendental idealist. 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, 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:
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 by Herman Van Breda and deposited at Leuven to form the Husserl-Archives of the Higher Institute of Philosophy. Much of the material in his research manuscripts has been published in the Husserliana critical edition series. Philosophers influenced by HusserlHermann 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. Max Scheler met Husserl in Halle and found in his phenomenology a methodological breakthrough for his own philosophical endeavors. Even though Scheler later criticised Husserl's idealistic logical approach and proposed instead a "phenomenology of love", he states that he remained "deeply indebted" to Husserl throughout his work. Husserl also had some influence on Pope John-Paul II, which appears strongly in a work by the latter, The Acting Person, or Person and Act. It was originally published in polish in 1969 under his pre-papal name Karol Wojtyla and combined phenomenological work with Thomistic Ethics.[4] Wilfrid Sellars, an influential figure in the so-called "Pittsburgh school" (Robert Brandom, John McDowell) had been a student of Marvin Farber, a pupil of Husserl, and was influenced by phenomenology through him: Marvin Farber led me through my first careful reading of the Critique of Pure Reason and introduced me to Husserl. His combination of utter respect for the structure of Husserl's thought with the equally firm conviction that this structure could be given a naturalistic interpretation was undoubtedly a key influence on my own subsequent philosophical strategy.[5] Husserl's formal analysis of language also inspired Stanisław Leśniewski and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz in the development of categorial grammar.[6] BibliographyWorks by Husserl
Works about Husserl
Other references
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