Robert Sokolowski

The two works on logic that Husserl published during his lifetime were Logical Investigations, which appeared in 1900–01 at the beginning of his career, and Formal and Transcendental Logic, which appeared in 1929 and was written just after he retired from teaching in 1928. The present volume contains lectures Husserl gave on logic and the theory of science during the years between these two publications. The main text of the book, comprising 330 pages, is a course he gave in Freiburg in 1917–18 during the winter semester. The course was originally given in 1910–11 when Husserl was at Göttingen, where it was repeated twice in 1912–13 and 1914–15. The volume also contains some fifty pages of supplementary texts, taken from materials that Husserl composed or used during the first presentation of the course in 1910–11. The critical apparatus is very extensive because it has to cover all the variations in the texts that arose as the courses were repeated. It should also be mentioned that the original version of this course drew on material that Husserl had discussed in earlier courses. Thus, the present volume gives a comprehensive picture of how Husserl’s thoughts on logic developed during his last years at Göttingen and his first years at Freiburg. The largest part of the book deals with the formal analysis of meaning and judgment.

FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE says that a word is composed of two parts, a sound-image and a concept: "The linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and an acoustic image." The sound-image signifies the concept: the sound-image is the signifier, the concept is the signified. De Saussure is only one of a large company of thinkers who describe words in this way. Most philosophical and semiotic analyses of words claim that words have two components, a dimension of sounds and a dimension of concepts.

Transcendental phenomenology is the mind’s self-discovery in the presence of intelligible objects. I differentiate the phenomenological sense of “transcendental” from its scholastic and Kantian senses, and show how the transcendental dimension cannot be eliminated from human discourse. I try to clarify the difference between prephilosophical uses of reason and the phenomenological use, and I suggest that the method followed by transcendental phenomenology is the working out of strategic distinctions. Its targets are the various blends of presence and absence that make up human cognition.