Burt Hopkins

Dear Colleague: Your letter shook me so profoundly that I was unable to answer it as soon as I should have. I am continuously concerned with it in my thoughts. Judge for yourself whether I have not inflicted more pain on myself than on you, and whether I may not ethically regard this guilt towards you and blame towards myself as stemming from the best conscience, something I have had to accept, and still must accept, as my fate. Clarifing the matter requires that I lay out a part of my life history. I had quickly realized that the project for Parts II and III of my Ideas was inadequate, and in an effort (beginning in the autumn of l9l2) to improve them and to shape in a more concrete and differentiated fashion the horizon of the problems they disclosed, I got involved in a new, quite far-ranging investigations. (These included the phenomenology of the person and personalities of a higher order, culture, the human environment in general; the transcendental phenomenology of “empathy” and the theory of transcendental intersubjectivity, the “transcendental aesthetic” as the phenomenology of the world purely as the world of experience, time and individuation, the phenomenology of association as the theory of the constitutive achievements of passivity, the phenomenology of the logos, the phenomenological problematic of “metaphysics,” etc.) These investigations stretched on all through the workfilled Freiburg years, and the manuscripts grew to an almost unmanageable extent. As the manuscripts grew so too did the ever greater the apprehension about whether, in my old age, I would be able to bring to completion what had been entrusted to me. This impassioned work led to repeated setbacks and repeated states of depression. In the end what I was left with was an allpervasive basic mood of depression, a dangerous collapse of confidence in myself. It was in this period that Heidegger began to mature -— for a number of..

Burt C. Hopkins presents the first in-depth study of the work of Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein on the philosophical foundations of the logic of modern symbolic mathematics. Accounts of the philosophical origins of formalized concepts—especially mathematical concepts and the process of mathematical abstraction that generates them—have been paramount to the development of phenomenology. Both Husserl and Klein independently concluded that it is impossible to separate the historical origin of the thought that generates the basic concepts of mathematics from their philosophical meanings. Hopkins explores how Husserl and Klein arrived at their conclusion and its philosophical implications for the modern project of formalizing all knowledge

La manière dont Jacob Klein rend compte de l’historicité propre aux unités de base de la signification dans la pensée de la Grèce ancienne ainsi que de l’Europe moderne est présentée et étudiée en relation au « sens de l'être » dans la pensée phénoménologique heideggerienne et à la conception husserlienne de la signification ontologique instrumentale du calcul symbolique. Sur le fond des reconstructions kleiniennes des nombres éidétiques dans le Sophiste de Platon et de l’ontologie cartésienne des objets mathématiques indéterminés, deux affirmations se trouvent avancées, à savoir (1) que la composition « artithmologique » de l'être dans le Sophiste de Platon représente un défi par rapport au caractère prétendument fondamental du « sens » dans l’historicité heideggerienne de l’être et (2) que la constitution de la conceptualité propre aux unités de base du calcul symbolique excède celle de la conception husserlienne de leur « simple » instrumentalité.

Burt C. Hopkins - Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Philosophy - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 271-273 Book Review Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Philosophy Steven Galt Crowell. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning:Paths Toward Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001. Pp. xvii + 323. Cloth, $79.95. Paper, $27.95. The "space of meaning" announced in the title of the present collection of essays has both a historical and systematic referent. Historically, it refers to the fact that it is now "possible to recognize that what has distinguished philosophy in the twentieth century is not that it has concerned itself with language, but that, whether through the prism of language or not, it has concerned itself with meaning". Systematically, it refers to the issues that emerge when the project of transcendental phenomenology is explored in a manner that..

What is at stake for Jacob Klein in François Vieta’s analytical art is the birth of both the “modern concept of ‘number’ [Zahl], as it underlies symbolic calculi” and the expanded, in contrast to ancient Greek science, scope of the generality of mathematical science itself. Of the former, Klein writes that it “heralds a general conceptual transformation which extends over the whole of modern science”. The latter, he says, lends the “treatment” [πραγματεία] at issue in the ancient Greek mathematical idea of a “‘general treatment’ [καθόλου πραγματεία]” “a completely new sense” “within the system of ‘science.’” The generality of this new sense will concern both the method and object of science in what will come to be known as universal mathematics. This transformation of the basic concept and scope, initially of mathematics and then of “the system of knowledge in general”, “concerns first and foremost the concept of ἀριθμόσ itself”. As a result of “its transfer into a new conceptual dimension” —i.e., into the dimension in which both “the concept of ‘number’ [Zahl]... is itself... as is that which it means” “symbolic in nature”—a transfer that “becomes visible” “for the first time in Vieta’s ‘general analytic,’” there follows “a thoroughgoing modification of the means and aims of science.” Klein maintains that what this modification involves is “best characterized by a phrase... in which Vieta expresses the ultimate problem, the problem proper, of his ‘analytical art’: ‘Analytical art appropriates to itself by right the proud problem of problems, which is: TO LEAVE NO PROBLEM UNSOLVED’.”

James F. Sheridan Allegheny College As we come to the end of the century, an attentive student of con temporary European philosophy will no doubt be startled by a volume titled Husserl in Contemporary Context. Such philosophers are most likely to believe that Hussed has now been declared II classical" rather than a contemporary thinker or, worse, simply old fashioned. Access to Hussed today will most likely come through the allegedly definitive critiques of his work by Heidegger and Derrida and to a lesser extent through the readings of his work by Levinas and Merleau Ponty although Merleau-Ponty himself has been declared old fashioned by some postmodems. Hence, if by II contemporary" one understands the problematic set by the work of the late Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, et. al., Hussed's work seems strange indeed in such a contemporary context, seems better understood as the last gasp of philosophy dominated by metaphysics and thus fit only for inclusion in courses in the history of philosophy.