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.

WE OFTEN USE PHRASES like, "knowing the essence of a thing" or "getting to the essence of a thing," but such expressions may be misleading and may provoke unfortunate epistemological problems. They suggest that we somehow extract an essence from the thing and make it, like a new thing, the target of our knowledge. They suggest a kind of vision, acquisition, or possession of the essence itself. If we have such a picture in mind when we speak of knowing an essence, many problems ensue that make us skeptical about ever having such knowledge. We begin to ask how we manage to extract this essence, what sort of intuition or vision is involved, whether the grasp of the essence is sudden or gradual, how the essence exists and how it is related to the things that have it. The problem with the picture is that the essence seems to be taken as a rather substantial object in its own right, a new object toward which we turn, something that we can pull out from other objects, from the individuals that contain the essence. The picture makes us formulate the philosophical problem of essences in the wrong way.

Philosophers have long agreed that thinking is expressed in the use of language, that we “think in the medium of words.” It is also true, however, that we think in the medium of pictures, and it is likely that these two ways of thinking are interrelated; certainly, we could not think in pictures if we did not have words, and perhaps we could not use words, in principle, unless we were also engaged in some sort of picturing, at least in our imagination. An ideographic language like Chinese would give greater support to the latter possibility than would our phonetically based form of writing.

This book explores a dimension in Husserl's thought that is, unfortunately, usually neglected, the analysis of formal structures in thinking. It examines such topics as formal ontology, formal logic, logic and mathematics, set theory, and, most of all, the theme of parts and wholes. Moreover the book does not just comment on Husserl's treatment of these topics; it pursues them as philosophical issues, shows how Husserl's position can be compared with that of other thinkers, and traces some of the influence he has exercised.

This essay presents several examples of intentional analysis, explains what intentional analysis is, and clarifies the meaning of "noema" in Husserl. Issues treated are: the concept of proposition or judgment in Husserl, the phenomenon of vagueness as a matrix for judgments, identity as achieved in intentional acts, and identity and opaqueness of reference. The interpretations of the noema given by Mohanty, Föllesdal, Gurwitsch and others are criticized and are shown to stem from an inadequate conception of what philosophical (as opposed to propositional) reflection is.

EVERYONE IS INVOLVED in the question of being in one way or another. When we ask someone how to change the oil in an automobile, or what the diameter of the moon is, or how numbers are different from numerals, we are asking about being. Such interrogations, whether addressed to others or addressed by ourselves to ourselves, are particular questions about beings. But when as metaphysicians we raise the question of being, we do not pursue just one more of these particular investigations. We ask a question that is somehow essentially singular, a question that cannot be made into many. If our question were to become plural, it would be a sign that we have cut off only part of being for our study and that we allow still other questions of being to be raised concerning the parts we have left out. It would be a sign that we have turned being into a genus, into one kind among many. Somehow the question of being has to be complete and comprehensive in itself; it has to be one question; and it must get at issues that enable all the particular questions to arise and to be answered. It is not that the question of being has nothing to do with questions about automobile oil and the diameter of the moon and numbers and numerals; the question of being can be recognized in all these particular questions, but it cannot be reduced to being one like them.

WHEN WORDS APPEAR THEY INTERRUPT the dense continuity of things. Pictures do so as well, but in a different way. The things surrounding me form a dense continuum: my attention can move from one thing to another without leaving what is immediately there. I can go from the table to the rug to the chair to the lamp and to the wall. But if at some point I come to a picture, this plain sequence is broken, and although it may quickly be picked up again, it is interrupted by the picture. When I hit the picture, I am no longer just with what is immediately there. I am with the depicted as well as with what is itself there. It is as though a fourth spatial dimension suddenly came into play, not effacing but being added to the three that were and are there all along. A new horizon appears and is blended with the one in which I am engaged.

Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenology is his first systematic attempt to show how phenomenology differs from natural science and in particular psychology. He does this by the phenomenological reduction. One of his achievements is to show that the formal structures of intentionality are more akin to logic than to psychology. I claim that Husserl’s argument can be made more intuitive if we consider phenomenology to be the study of truth rather than knowledge, and if we see the reduction as primarily a modification in our vocabulary and discourse and not as simply a change in attitude. I briefly compare Husserl’s concept of philosophy with those of Plato and Kant.

For all these reasons, it is helpful to have a volume such as the one under review, which gives the historical and textual background for Crisis. Ably edited by Reinhold N. Smid, who has been associated with the Husserl Archives at Cologne for many years, the volume contains papers from the period 1934-37, just before Husserl's death in 1938. Crisis itself was published in its present form only posthumously in 1954, but its first two parts appeared in the journal Philosophia, published in Belgrade, in 1936. The idea of composing this work came to Husserl after he gave two lectures in Prague on 14-15 November 1935. The lectures provided the nucleus for Crisis, and the typescript for them is published in thirty-three pages of this volume. It is interesting to note that the title for the typescript is "Psychology in the Crisis of European Science." Although psychology is extensively treated in Crisis, the issue of that science is not one of the themes that commentators usually discuss. It is helpful to see how central psychology was in Husserl's later thought. The point is that he must distinguish the philosophical study of man from the empirical psychological study if he is to avoid taking philosophy as merely a partial science and if he is not to betray the special mode of being of transcendental subjectivity. The study of man must not be carried out according to the "objectivist" methods of modern science.

This volume of fifteen essays plus an introduction and preface is the outcome of a conference organized by Dominik Perler at Basel in June 1999. The topic is obviously interesting and important. Intentionality has been the hallmark issue of phenomenology for over a century, and it is common knowledge that the name and concept were introduced by Franz Brentano, who said he was reviving a medieval idea that had deeper roots in antiquity. The topic has also entered into analytic philosophy through the problem of representationalism, and at least some thinkers in that tradition, such as Searle and Chisholm, have formulated this problem as one of intentionality. It becomes incumbent on scholars to inquire how the modern issues of intentionality and representationalism are both similar to and different from their formulations in antiquity and the middle ages. The conference and the book have brought together some prominent authorities who can respond to these questions.

Distinctions are set in obscurity and imagination. Distinctions are not made anywhere and anytime, nor are they made in no place and at no time; they are made in a situation in which they are called for. Distinctions push against an obscurity that needs the distinction in question. In the story about Jack and the doctor, the obscurity against which the distinction is made is included as part of the story; in the quotation from Chaucer the obscurity that provides the setting for the distinction is not mentioned—although you would find it if you were to read the Wife of Bath’s tale—but it is easy for us to imagine a setting in which the distinction between counseling and commandment ought to be made. When we entertain a distinction, such as "counseling is not commandment," "ignorance is not negligence," or "medical data is not medical care," we always experience or imagine an obscurity against which the distinction arises. When we think philosophically about executing distinctions, we must pay attention to the obscurity that lets the distinction occur.

The first part of this essay presents Patrick Masterson’s exposition of the phenomenology of religion developed by Jean-Luc Marion, and his exposition of the Thomistic philosophy of religion. Masterson argues that phenomenology can be helpful as an analysis of faith and religious experience, but it remains within subjective immanence. It needs to be complemented by a metaphysical analysis that deals with causation and explanation, as Thomism does. The essay then makes three points: first, that phenomenology need not be limited to the merely subjective domain nor need it fail to speak about being; second, that Thomistic “cognitional existence,” as developed by Joseph Owens, can be fruitfully compared with the domain studied by phenomenology as the analysis of being as truth; third, that the “saturated phenomena” introduced by Marion and used by Masterson involve categorial articulation and hence some initiative on the part of the knower, even in matters of religious faith. The essay discusses issues such as the nature of philosophical discourse, the differences between the modern and the premodern understandings of appearance; and the nature of cognitional existence in words and images.