Husserl and Analytic Philosophy

Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783110494181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

The book contributes to the refutation of the separation of philosophy in the 20th century into analytic and continental. It is shown that Edmund Husserl was seriously concerned with issues of so-called analytic philosophy, that there are strict parallelisms between Husserl's treatment of philosophical subjects and those of authors in the analytic tradition, and that Husserl had a strong influence on Rudolf Carnap's 'Aufbau'.

Part I:Husserl and Analytic Philosophy: A General Assessment

Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock

Husserl as Analytic Philosopher

Abstract: Analytic philosophers tend to ostracize Husserl without ever having read him. In fact, very few scholars know that in a text from 1908–09 Husserl stated that analysis was the method of philosophy and that logic was ‘first philosophy’. In fact, as Frege himself acknowledged, Husserl obtained the sense-reference distinction independently of him. The rest of the paper is concerned with Husserl’s many contributions, ignored by analytic philosophers, to the philosophy of logic and mathematics, the philosophy of language, the epistemology of mathematics and even the philosophy of physical science.

§1Introduction

Consider the following quotations:

Introduction in this philosophical logic means at the same time introduction to philosophy properly. Since philosophical logic is the introductory discipline of philosophy, it is the first one in view of its nature in the series of philosophical disciplines, it is presupposition and foundation for all the other disciplines that can be called philosophical in a genuine sense. In order to use an Aristotelian expression…: it is “first philosophy”, and by the way first philosophy in the most rigorous and authentic sense.1

Our procedure will be purely analytic. We proceed from what is near to us, from what is evident to the beginner.2

Our path being analytic proceeds from the composite and near to us to what is simple…. Every science grounds, and analytic grounding laws ought to belong in common to all sciences. Thus, let us go on analytically.3

The above quotations are certainly not from Frege or from any acknowledged analytic philosopher. Nonetheless, they put logic – or philosophical logic – as the most fundamental philosophical discipline, as first philosophy, and analysis as the method of first philosophy. The quotations are from a little known text of Husserl, namely, his 1908–1909 lectures on ancient and new logic. The fact of the matter is that even that relatively late Husserl was concerned with some of the problems that concerned Gottlob Frege, the so-called ‘father of analytic philosophy’. Thus, Husserl could very well have been considered one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy. Of course, orthodox historians of analytic philosophy would immediately object that Husserl was no empiricist, though Frege himself had nothing to do with empiricism, being clearly a Platonist in the philosophy of mathematics and a rationalist all his life. Thus, if on the basis of not being a sort of empiricist or even nominalist you want to exclude Husserl from having been a sort of analytic philosopher, you would also have to exclude Frege.

In any case, it is interesting that the course on ancient and new logic from which those quotations were taken is from the winter semester of 1908–1909, thus, it was given more than one year after his course on “the idea of phenomenology”, which is usually considered the official date of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological turn, and three years after his course on the phenomenology of internal time consciousness, which already dealt with issues central to his transcendental phenomenology. Those two sets of lectures, certainly, can be seen as a return to epistemology as first philosophy, and in its most radical Cartesian sense. Nonetheless, the fact of the matter is that the transcendental turn did not bring with it any essential changes either in Husserl’s views on the nature and foundational role of logic or of mathematics, or in his explanation in the Sixth Logical Investigation of how we have access to logical and mathematical entities and truths. No discipline, not even epistemology, can violate the laws of logic or mathematics, though it can very well try to explain how we have access to such laws. In fact, in Husserl’s philosophy there are two very different senses in which one can legitimately say – of course, without contradiction – that logic is first philosophy and that epistemology is also first philosophy. Leaving that issue aside, let us consider other Husserlian texts that can serve to confirm our thesis that Husserl can very well be considered, besides a phenomenologist, also an analytic philosopher.

§2Frege and Husserl on Sense and Referent

The best-known contribution of Gottlob Frege to analytic philosophy is the semantic distinction between sense and referent introduced by Frege for the first time in his 1891 paper “Funktion und Begriff”4 and discussed extensively in his classic paper of analytic philosophy “Über Sinn und Bedeutung”5 of 1892. However, there is a posthumously published text of Husserl, dating from 1890, in which the distinction between sense and referent is also made. Moreover, in his 1891 critical review of Ernst Schröder’s Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik I 6, published in March of 1891, thus, two months after the publication of Frege’s “Funktion und Begriff” – but sent to the publisher already in January –, Husserl makes use of that semantic distinction. Furthermore, in a letter to Husserl of May 1891 Frege acknowledges what hard-core analytic philosophers would never acknowledge, namely, that Husserl obtained the distinction independently of Frege. In fact, a few decades earlier Bolzano had almost obtained the fundamental semantic distinction.7 But leaving the great Bolzano aside, it seems pertinent to quote Husserl once more.

In the case of indirect signs it is necessary to distinguish that which the sign means from that which it designates. In the case of direct signs the two are the same. The meaning of a proper name, for example, consists precisely in that it names this determinate object. In the case of indirect signs, however, there are intermediaries between sign and thing, and the sign designates exactly by means of these intermediaries, and precisely because of this [fact] constitute the meaning.8

Two signs are equivalent in case they designate in different manner the same object or objects of the same contour, be it by means of external or conceptual means, for example, a pair of names with the same meaning, like king and rex; William the third=the present German emperor, 2+3=7–2=√25.9

Meanwhile…the author identifies the meaning of a name with the representation of the object named by the name…. Moreover, he uses the term meaning equivocally, and [does] this in an already unacceptable level. In the above quotation, the incompatible and confusing explanations aside, what is pointed out to is the usual sense. But in another occasion what is really meant is the object named by the name.10

With the unclearness about the concept of meaning is, moreover, connected [the fact] that Schröder puts names of the sort of “round circle” as ‘senseless” together with those with one or more meanings. Obviously, he confuses two different questions, namely, 1) whether a name has a meaning (a “sense”); and 2) whether an object corresponding to it exists or does not exist. Senseless names in a strict sense are names without meaning, pseudonames like Abracadabra. “Round circle”, however, is a univocal general name to which, nonetheless, nothing really corresponds.11

Although one could add here a pair of additional passages from ‘Zur Logik der Zeichen’ to make ad nauseam clear that Husserl obtained the sense-referent distinction independently of Frege, we prefer to include another quotation from Husserl’s review of Schröder’s book because it also serves to make clear that already in 1891, hence three years before Frege’s late review of his Philosophie der Arithmetik, Husserl had already abandoned the mild psychologism of his youth book, and clearly distinguished the logical content of a statement –its meaning– from any psychological sort of content.

That is why also Schröder’s distinction between “logical” and “psychological” content of a judgement, or more exactly: of a statement, is unacceptable. The truly logical content of a statement is the judgement content, hence, that what it states.12

Interest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Husserl and Analytic Philosophy: A General Assessment
• Part II: Husserl and some Analytic Philosophers
• Part III: Appendices
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Endnotes