Husserl: Critique of Psychologism

Je soutiens que la prise en compte de Lotze dans la genèse de la phénoménologie du jeune Husserl fournit de nouveaux éléments qui supportent la lecture frégéenne de la phénoménologie. Pour ce faire, je vais d’abord retracer l’origine lozéenne des questions épistémologiques issues du développement de la nouvelle psychologie et de la logique au milieu du XIXe siècle en Allemagne et j’insisterai sur l’apport de trois de ses étudiants prestigieux; je montrerai ensuite que Husserl a acquis sa connaissance de cette (...) problématique via sa fréquentation de Brentano et de Stumpf; je me pencherai ensuite sur la tournant antipsychologiste de Husserl au milieu des années 1890 et examinerai brièvement un manuscrit de Husserl intitulé « Microcosmos » qui date de cette même période et qui montre clairement l’apport de la logique de Lotze dans ce tournant antipsychologiste; j’examinerai enfin brièvement l’apport de Lotze dans la critique que Husserl adresse au psychologisme logique dans ses Prolégomènes. Je conclurai avec quelques remarques sur l’importance de Lotze dans la phénoménologie de Husserl après la publication des Recherches logiques. (shrink)

Psychologism is defined as “the doctrine that the laws of mathematics and logic can be reduced to or depend on the laws governing thinking”. And for Husserl, the laws of logic include the laws of meaning: “logic evidently is the science of meanings as such [Wissenschaft von Bedeutungen als solchen]” 98/2001 225). I argue that, since it is sufficient for a theory to be psychologistic if the empiricistic theory of abstraction is employed, it follows that neural networks are psychologistic insofar (...) as they use this theory of abstraction, which I demonstrate is the case 191/2001 120). It’s sufficient for psychologism because, according to Husserl, the theory in question reduces one’s phenomenological ability to intend types to one’s past history of intending tokens, usually amalgamated in some fashion. Similarly dynamical systems theory entails psychologism. For dynamical systems theory ties content to the temporal evolution of a system, which, according to Husserl, violates the fact that intentionality toward validities and objectivities does not pertain to "particular temporal experience[s]" 194/2001 121). It follows that neither the species, nor the genus, can avoid psychologism and intend objects "in specie". After critiquing these two approaches, I proceed to give an account based on the essentialist school of cognitive psychology of how we may intend objects "in specie" while avoiding the empiricistic theory of abstraction. Such an account preserves the type-token distinction without psychologistic reduction to the temporal evolution of a dynamical system. This opens the way toward a truly unifying account of Husserlian phenomenology in league with cognitive science that avoids Yoshimi's and neurophenomenology's psychologistic foundation and builds upon Sokolowski's syntactic account of Husserlian phenomenology. (shrink)

The question of the psychologism of the theory of number developed by Husserl in his Philosophy of Arithmetic has long been debated, but it cannot be considered fully resolved. In this paper, I address the issue from a new point of view. My claim is that in the Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl made, albeit indirectly, a series of arguments that are worth reconstructing and clarifying since they are useful in shedding some light on the psychologism issue. More specifically, I maintain (...) that the clarification of these arguments, along with other arguments that Husserl presented against alternative theories of number as well as with some contemporary distinctions concerning the notion of ontological dependence, allows us to determine that Husserl’s theory of number is psychologistic in a minimal and precise sense: it entails a generic ontological dependence of numbers upon the mind. (shrink)

I investigate the role of the subject in judgment in Kant, Frege, and Husserl, situating it in the broader and less-often-considered context of their accounts of presentation as well as judgment. Contemporary philosophical usage of “representation” tends to elide the question of what Kant called the constitution of content, because of a reluctance, traced to Frege’s anti-psychologism, to attend to subjectivity. But for Kant and Husserl, anti-psychologism allows for synthesis as the subjective act necessary for both “mere presentation” and judgment. (...) In Begriffshrift, Frege alludes to a significant logical role for the subjective act of judgment, and in later work, traces of this logical role remain in the intensional notions of grasping a thought and judging as acknowledging its truth. But Frege’s anti-psychologism blocks interpreting these subjective notions in term of synthesis. Although similar in certain ways to Frege and equally anti-psychologistic, Husserl’s theory of judgment in the Logical Investigations maintains a role for subjective syntheses for presentations and judgments, and goes beyond Kant in allowing for a kind of objectivity at the level of non-judgment presentations. These two great anti-psychologists at the dawn of the parallel heydays of linguistic and phenomenological analysis are thus differentiated by the fates they assign to the act of synthesis. (shrink)

Husserl and Frege reject logical psychologism, the view that logical laws are psychological 'laws of thought'. This paper offers an account of these famous objections and argues that their crucial premise, the necessity of logical laws, is justified with reference to a problematic metaphysics. However, this premise can be established in a more plausible way, namely via a transcendental argument which starts from the practice of rational criticism. This argument is developed through a discussion of Quine's holism, which at first (...) appears to make the idea of the necessity of logical laws even less plausible, but eventually turns out to speak in favor of this view. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s objections against the possibility of a science of aesthetics were influential on different sides of the analytic/continental divide. Heidegger’s anti-scientism leads him to an alētheic view of artworks which precedes and exceeds any possible aesthetic reduction. Wittgenstein also rejects the relevance of causal explanations, psychological or physiological, to aesthetic questions. The main aim of this paper is to compare Heidegger with Wittgenstein, showing that: there are significant parallels to be drawn between Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s anti-scientism about aesthetics, (...) and that their anti-scientism leads both towards partly divergent criticisms of what I will call ‘aestheticism’. The divergence is mainly due to a broader metaphilosophical disagreement concerning appeals to ordinary language. Thus situating the two philosophers’ positions facilitates a possible critical dialogue between analytic and continental approaches in aesthetics. (shrink)

One of the fundamental subjects of logic philosophy has been the question of inference formal validity independence in regard to psychology and subjectivity. This paper proposes and examines the thesis formed by the following statements: the anti-psychologism position, defended by the Frege-Husserl tradition, meant as a foundation for the formal-symbolic approach as logic essence. Anti-psychologism main arguments, which affirm that logic is not reducible to psychology, are precisely the arguments that defend the idea of logic being, and having to be, (...) only and essentially formal. Therefore, necessity, accuracy, prescription, and universality all depend on formality; based on some current cognitive science approaches, especially those of Stennings and van Lambalgen, the idea that the nature of logic is exclusively founded on formality and symbolism is critically examined. (shrink)

Psichologizmas yra loginių ir psichologinių terminų reikšmių tapatinimas. Husserlio Prolegomenai yra žymiausias psichologizmą kritikuojantis tekstas. Iki šiol buvo atviras klausimas, kas būtent juose įrodyta. Šio straipsnio tikslas yra į jį atsakyti. Pagrindinis straipsnyje ginamas teiginys yra toks: Prolegomenuose Husserlis įrodė, kad jei reliatyvizmas klaidingas, tai psichologizmas klaidingas, bet neįrodė reliatyvizmo ar psichologizmo klaidingumo, nes jis neįrodė, kad reliatyvizmas save paneigia. Pirmiausia nagrinėjami du kartais Husserliui priskiriami įrodymai: paremtasis prielaida, kad logika yra normatyvi, ir paremtasis prielaida, kad psichologija remiasi logika. Tvirtinama, (...) kad jie nesuderinami su logikos samprata Prolegomenuose. Tuomet nagrinėjami likę įrodymai ir parodoma, kaip iš jų plaukia, kad jei reliatyvizmas klaidingas, tai psichologizmas klaidingas. Galiausiai nagrinėjamas įrodymas, kad reliatyvizmas save paneigia vienu ar kitu būdu: ar savaime, ar tuomet, kai yra išreiškiamas, ar tada, kai įrodinėjamas kitam. Teigiama, kad reliatyvizmo klaidingumas juo neįrodytas. Straipsnio išvados reikšmingos bet kokiam logiką reliatyvizuojančiam požiūriui. (shrink)

This paper, after a brief historical introduction about the author analyses some features of phenomenological anthropology of Gerda Walther, taking especially into account his main work, Phenomenology of the Mystical, from the second edition of 1955 (trad. ital., 2008). In it, Walther presents a real treaty of the philosophical anthropology, as part of a preliminary analysis of the mystical phenomena to relate anthropological elements from a phenomenological analysis of the human being and the philosophical-religious problems of mystical experience and paranormal (...) experiences. In this work identifies, in addition to the influence of the Husserl’s method, the influx of Pfänder’s phenomenology, mainly in the use of metaphors to explain the formation of the human person. One of the fundamental theses of his anthropology is that every human being has an I-Center (Ichzentrum) with the features of self-consciousness and capability to will. In it, the author showed dependence of elaboration from Pfänder’s Comprehensive Psychology, but also of the phenomenology of Husserl, Scheler and Stein, in particular by its conception of “heart of me” (Einbettung des Ich) which denotes similarities with the “I-animic” of Stein, a concept derived from a review of “I-pure” of Husserl. (shrink)

El propósito del presente estudio es afirmar la deuda de Husserl con la filosofía de Lotze durante el período de Halle. Mi interés se centra especialmente en el pensamiento del joven Husserl desde su llegada a Halle en 1886 hasta la publicación de su Hauptwerk en 1900-1901. Primero me remontaré a las fuentes del conocimiento de la filosofía de Lotze por parte de Husserl durante sus estudios con Brentano en Viena y después con Stumpf en Halle. Luego comentaré brevemente las (...) referencias de Husserl a Lotze en sus primeros trabajos y en sus manuscritos de investigación para el segundo volumen de su Filosofía de la aritmética. En la tercera sección, examino la influencia de Lotze en el giro antipsicologista de Husserl a mediados de la década de 1890. La cuarta sección es un comentario al manuscrito de Husserl titulado "Microcosmos", al cual se refiere explícitamente en sus Prolegómenos, y que planeaba publicar como anexo a sus Investigaciones lógicas. Esta obra contiene un análisis detallado del tercer volumen de la Lógica de Lotze de 1874. La última sección examina los argumentos de Husserl contra el psicologismo lógico en sus Prolegómenos, que yo expongo a través del prisma de la crítica de Stumpf al psicologismo en su artículo "Psicología y teoría del conocimiento". Sostengo que las primeras obras de Stumpf sobre este asunto hacen posible establecer una conexión entre la interpretación de Lotze de la teoría de las Ideas de Platón y el antipsicologismo de Husserl. Mi hipótesis es que los análisis de Stumpf representan el fondo de la crítica de Husserl al psicologismo lógico en sus Investigaciones lógicas. Concluiré este estudio mostrando que la posición de Husserl respecto de la filosofía de Lotze permanece básicamente la misma después de la publicación de sus Investigaciones lógicas, y que la principal crítica de Husserl a Lotze se refiere, en un último análisis, a la ausencia de una teoría de la intencionalidad en la filosofía de Lotze. (shrink)

The central and probably most controversial point concerning the psychologism — anti-psychologism debate is the problem of Frege’s alleged influence on the change in Husserl’s views. Contemporary thinkers investigating the early period of Husserl’s philosophy have attempted to show that the opinion that Frege’s doctrine had a traumatic influence on Husserl’s views is not justified. This paper, which tries to maintain a balance between strictly philosophical argumentation and narrowly understood historical argumentation, suggests an alternative solution. By appealing to Frege’s works (...) published before 1894, the locus of psychologism will be determined. Afterwards, I will present Husserl’s and Frege’s views on the elucidation procedure and the distinction between calculus and ‘lingua characteristica’. By discussing Husserl’s works from 1894-1897, I will show that his standpoint changed dramatically as he entered into the anti-psychological program, involving a new theory of concepts, judgment, and the so-called ‘pure Fregean flavour’ — a new account of logical content. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to investigate the roots of phenomenology and to analyse, from a historical and systematic point of view, the reasons that enabled Husserl to set down in his Logical Investigations the conditions of a strictly descriptive philosophy. The ‘breakthrough’ of phenomenology was made possible by Husserl’s investigations on the specificity of logical forms, and was grounded upon his ability to establish in the Logical Investigations a descriptive distinction between sensitive and categorial forms. Such distinction allows (...) Husserl to account for the possibility of a certain kind of adequacy between speech and perception that is necessarily involved in phenomenological description. Indeed, as a descriptive activity, phenomenology entails the opposition between two fundamentally different modalities of intentionality that both take part in description: intuition on the one hand and signification on the other. By making the adequacy between signification and intuition possible, ‘categorial intuition’ not only sheds new light on the relations between thought and perception, or between seeing and thinking, it also legitimates phenomenological description as a philosophical method. This book proposes a new and revisited reading of the Logical Investigations by examining Husserl’s reform of the theory of categories and its relation to the phenomenological method of description. (shrink)

The term ‘psychologism’ is normally used for the doctrine that logical and mathematical truths must be explained in terms of psychological truths (see Kusch 1995 and 2011). As such, the term is typically pejorative: the widespread consensus is that psychologism in this sense is a paradigm of philosophical error, a gross mistake that was identified and conclusively refuted by Frege and Husserl.

Twentieth-century philosophy has often been pictured as divided into two camps, analytic and continental. This study challenges this depiction by examining encounters between some of the leading representatives of either side. Starting with Husserl and Frege's fin-de-siècle turn against psychologism, it turns to Carnap's 1931 attack on Heidegger's metaphysics (together with its background in the Cassirer-Heidegger dispute of 1929), moving on to Ayer's 1951 meeting with Bataille and Merleau-Ponty at a Parisian bar, followed by the 'dialogue of the deaf' between (...) Oxford linguistic philosophers and phenomenologists at the 1951 Royaumont colloquium, leading up to the Derrida-Searle controversy. Careful study shows that it is implausible to assume the existence of a century-old 'gulf' between two sides of philosophy. Vrahimis argues that miscommunication and ignorance over the exact content of the above encounters must to a large extent be held accountable for any perceived gap. (shrink)

Husserlian phenomenology has often been cited as having influenced research methodologies within nursing research and psychology. However, at the same time, Husserl is explicitly opposed to what he termed as psychologism. The following thesis argues that Husserl’s opposition to the psychology of his day was based specifically upon his opposition of naturalism’s treatment of consciousness. Moreover, the thesis argues that there is a tendency within the Social Sciences to misread Husserlian Phenomenology as a type of introspectionists’ account of subjective states. (...) The thesis critiques the claim that cognitive therapy is Husserlian phenomenology, but concludes that there are aspects of cognitive psychotherapy which do appear to be using parts of a methodology that Husserl would have recognised as a legitimate phenomenology. Indeed, the thesis argues that by gaining a further understanding of Husserl’s ‘discovery’ of attitude and interest and the fundamental structures of intentionality, cognitive therapists could enhance and further their understanding of what takes place within the change process during cognitive psychotherapy; and conversely, cognitive therapy’s description of the maintenance of emotional disorders can contribute to Husserl’s own account of the natural attitude. That is, that the natural attitude consists of a universalising attitude which is fundamental to the natural attitude per se. The thesis develops this argument further, by examining the theoretical underpinnings within cognitive therapy and extrapolating what appears as the incidental, yet significant, phenomenological structures within cognitive therapy’s clinical interventions. The thesis uses the identified phenomenological structures within cognitive therapy’s treatment of emotional disorder to firstly, further develop the phenomenological description of the universalising attitude as a subset to the natural attitude which, it is argued disguises or presents itself as the ‘genuine natural attitude’. Secondly, the concept of the universalising attitude is developed further to suggest a hierarchy of attitudes within the natural attitude. (shrink)

This paper aims to show how Husserl’s concept of intentionality detaches itself from the background of a thorough and recurrent argument that Husserl makes against psychologism. Noting that the concept of intentionality was first recovered by Brentano’s psychology, it seemed to us important to show how Husserl’s intentionality, as it is conceived in the Logical Investigations, distinguishes itself from the “intentional inexistence” that Brentano describes in his Psychology from an Empirical Stand­point. Showing which parts of Brentano’s psychology were rejected and (...) which were maintained in Husserl’s theory is indeed the first concern of those who intend to study the phenomenological concept of intentionality. (shrink)

Danger of skeptic consequences of relativism was one of the main motives which led Edmund Husserl to taking up polemic with psychologism. This polemic was discussed and analyzed repeatedly, so instead of speculating on validity and importance of each of the arguments used, I rather focus on the structure of argumentation articulated in Prolegomena to pure logic and to consider the role of frequently dismissed thread of the epistemological absolutism’s apology. For Husserl this absolutism is strictly connected with a conception (...) of signifi cances as ideal species, thus in next step I try to show that basic draft of this conception is present already in polemic arguments of Prolegomena. That in turn appears to lead up to the conclusion, which – contrary to the declarations – that in respect of systematic the Husserl’s polemic over relativism is placed before strict phenomenological turning point – it seems to be its ramification. Subsequently I demonstrate how becomingaware of this fact leads Husserl straight to the idea of phenomenological reduction. (shrink)

L’ambition de cet article est de reformuler l’ontologie des propositions proposée par Husserl dans ses Prolegomena zur reinen Logik (1900). Dans cet ouvrage, Husserl affirme que les propositions, auxquelles a trait ce qu’il appelle la “logique pure”, sont des propriétés (des “species”) d’actes, mettons d’actes de jugement. En outre, il considère les propriétés comme circonscrivant toutes leurs instantiations possibles. Sur cette base, on comprend mieux en quel sens la réflexion de Husserl sur la nature de la logique dépend de son (...) ontologie des propositions. Dans cet article, les deux points suivants sont discutés dans cette perspective. D’abord, la structure de son argument négatif contre le psychologisme n’est dans son ensemble correctement comprise que si l’on prend en considération l’ontologie husserlienne des propositions. Cela explique pourquoi la conception de la logique comme une science normative a priori ne satisfait pas Husserl lorsqu’il vise à réfuter le psychologisme. Ensuite, sa conception positive des lois logiques serait aussi rendue plus intelligible par cette théorie. Celle-ci fournit tout ce qui est nécessaire pour réfuter le psychologisme sans renoncer pour autant à une conception globalement aristotélicienne de la logique, que Husserl tient pour indispensable mais qu’il serait particulèrement difficile de maintenir dans le cadre de la conception normative a priori. (shrink)

Husserl is famous for his critique of foundational psychologism. However, his relationship to psychologism is not entirely negative. His conception of philosophy is indebted also to nineteenth-century ideas of a psychological foundation of logic and philosophy. This is manifest both in historical influences on Husserl and in debates between Husserl and his contemporaries. These areas are to be investigated, with a particular focus on the Logical Investigations and the works from the period of Husserl’s transition to the transcendental phenomenology. It (...) is hoped that the investigation could contribute towards the better understanding of Husserl’s idea of the foundation of his phenomenology. (shrink)

A hundred years ago Frege had published most of his arguments against psychologism and Husserl was busy writing his Logical Investigations, which was to appear at the turn of the century and open with a long onslaught on psychologism. The arguments of these two logicians against the psychologistic view - of Mill, Erdmann and many others - that the discipline of logic, its sentences, or its "laws", deal with psychological phenomena met with widespread approval from those best qualified to judge (...) (for example Lukasiewicz). They set the agenda for most twentieth century work in exact, "scientific", or analytic philosophy. As the century draws to its close, many of the arguments of Frege and Husserl have been found wanting by analytic philosophers and cognitive scientists who are prepared to argue that the laws of logic are just laws of human thought. (shrink)

Résumé — Dans cet article, je postule qu’il y a plusieurs variétés d’antipsychologisme logique, auxquelles correspondent différents concepts de « logique pure ». Deux conceptions sont ici confrontées : la « logique de l’idéalité » de Husserl et la « logique de la validité » de Rickert. Contrairement à l’emploi équivoque des termes « validité » et « idéalité » chez Heidegger, je montre d’abord que ces deux conceptions, bien que très proches, ne sont pas parfaitement superposables, car Rickert partage (...) l’antipsychologisme de Husserl mais rejette sa théorie des significations. Il apparaît ensuite que cette divergence – particulièrement visible dans la recension inédite, par Rickert, du livre très controversé de Palágyi – touche en réalité un « point faible » des Recherches logiques de Husserl : la confusion entre les objets logiques et les idéalités mathématiques. L’alternative « axiologique » proposée par Rickert évite d’emblée cette confusion en soutenant que le sens logique des propositions, fondé sur de pures « valeurs théoriques », est irréductible à un objet idéal.— In this article, I postulate that there are several varieties of logical antipsychologism, to which correspond various concepts of “pure logic”. Two conceptions are here under discussion : Husserl’s “logic of ideality” and Rickert’s “logic of validity”. Against the equivocal use of “validity” and “ideality” by Heidegger, I first show that none of those conceptions can be exactly superimposed on the other one, because Rickert agrees with Husserl’s antipsychologism but rejects his theory of significations. It then appears that this difference – which is particularly obvious in Rickert’s unpublished review of Palágyi’s very controversial book –, reveals in fact a “weak point” in Husserl’s Logical Investigations : the confusion between logical and mathematical objects . Rickert’s “axiological” alternative avoids directly this confusion by asserting the irreducibility of the propositional sense – which is grounded on pure “theoretical values” – to an ideal object. (shrink)

According to Edmund Husserl in the Prolegomena to Pure Logic, which constitutes the preliminary rational foundation for – and also the entire first volume of – his Logical Investigations, pure logic is the a priori theoretical, nomological science of „demonstration“.1 For him, demonstration includes both consequence and provability. Consequence is the defining property of all and only formally valid arguments, i. e., arguments that cannot lead from true premises to false conclusions. And provability is the property of a logical system (...) such that, for every truth of logic in that system, there is, at least in principle, a rigorous step-by-step logically valid procedure demonstrating its validity according to strictly universal, ideal, and necessary logical laws. In this way, the laws of pure logic completely determine its internal structure. Moreover, these laws and these proofs are all knowable a priori, with selfevident insight. So not only is pure logic independent of any other theoretical science, in that it requires no other science in order to ground its core notion of demonstration, it also provides both epistemic and semantic foundations for every other theoretical science, as well as every practical discipline or „technology. “ To the extent that pure logic is the foundation of every other. (shrink)

In this brief article, I review the main argument's of Robert Hanna's <em>Rationality and Logic</em>.

I undertake to explain how the well known laws of formal logic – Barbara Syllogism, modus ponens, etc. – relate to experience by developing Edmund Husserl's critique ofFormalism and Psychologism in logical theory and then briefly explaining his positive views of the laws of logic. His view rests upon his understanding of the proposition as a complex, intentional property. The laws of formal logic are, on his view (and mine), statements about the truth values of propositions as determined by their (...) formal character and relationships alone. The laws thus understood explain how algorithms set up to mirror them can accomplish what they do to advance knowledge, even though they operate purely mechanically. Further, they explain the proper sense in which formal laws "govern," and may guide, processes of actual thinking. Husserl's theory is a realist theory in the sense that, on his interpretation, the laws of pure or formal logic hold true regardless of what any individual, culture or species may or may not think, or even if no thinking ever occurs. (shrink)

The paper discusses critically the evolution of Lipps's view on logic and psychology. According to Lipps, psychology is the fundamental science on which the other sciences are grounded, and "logic is a special discipline of psychology". Husserl criticizes such conception, which falls into a confusion of domains, and proposes the idea of a pure logic on the basis of the distinction between ideal and real. Lipps replies to Husserl maintaining that the overcoming of psychologism requires both a sharp separation of (...) object and content and a distinction of the different meanings of psychology. The latter is, according to Lipps, not an empirical science, but the science of the self, pure psychology, i.e., something like Aristotle's first philosophy; as such, psychology is the ground of logic: the laws of logic are valid both for thought and for objects, but they are facts of consciousness and hence they belong to psychology. Finally, an evaluation is given of various interpretations of Lipps's attempts to overcome psychologism. (shrink)

Once upon a time, Frege influenced Husserl. More precisely, Frege's scathing review of Philosophie der Arithmetik induced Husserl to abandon his commitment to logical psychologism. There are many different reasons for dismissing this traditional tale. Yet at least one widely circulated claim cannot be upheld, for it is rooted in the false belief that Frege held logic to be an essentially normative science. Rather, Frege and Husserl are united by their shared conception of logic as the maximally general theoretical science. (...) Further, it is proposed that Frege indeed may have influenced Husserl in the movement from psychologism to phenomenology. This time, however, the novel possibility is entertained that Frege provided Husserl with nothing less than an initial rationale of the very need for a phenomenology: the epistemological clarification of the cognitive sources of "pure logic". Along the way, Frege's peculiar Kantianism is revealed to be of a piece with his philosophical contemporaries, the neo-Kantians, in its dependence upon the central notion of a source of knowledge. As a key component of Frege's theory, it is revealed not as an artefact of the new logic but rather as part of the earliest picture which serves to undergird Frege's views on the nature of epistemological justification. (shrink)

This article looks back at some aspects of the heritage of Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations on the occasion of that work's centennial, following some clues Husserl offered in his own 1925 retrospective evaluation. The themes pursued are: Dilthey's surprisingly enthusiastic appreciation of the work; Husserl's subsequent recognition of the kernel of truth in psychologism; the complex question of phenomenology as descriptive psychology; and, finally, the distinctive view of mental life introduced in that work.

Husserl’s refutation of psychologism one hundred years ago in his opus mag-num Logische Untersuchungen is a painfully detailed enterprise. After justi-fying the existence of logic as a separate practical discipline, Husserl first shows that normative and a fortiori practical disciplines are founded on theoretical ones. He then formulates the psychologistic theses, extracts empirical consequences from them and shows how psychologism distorts the content of logical laws. The nucleus of the refutation consists in six arguments showing that specific relativism and, in (...) particu-lar, anthropologism is a form of skepticism, and, finally, establishing that psycholo-gism is a specific relativism, an anthropologism. A more direct and brief refutation follows, in which Husserl brings to the fore the prejudices on which psychologism is based. (shrink)

It is by now common knowledge that analytic philosophy has its roots, at least partially, in phenomenology. It is less known that analytic philosophy has inherited part of its original antipsychologism precisely from phenomenology, or rather from early phenomenology. The present article traces the historical brackground of antipsychologism, starting with the debate on the philosophical foundations of psychology during the 19th century. It appears that naturalistic antipsychologism, the early phenomenologists position, has to be distinguished from transcendental antipsychologism, as it was (...) promoted most prominently by Husserl after 1907. The article explains how this divide emerged from different conceptions of the specificity of the philosophical inquiry into the mind, as opposed to its psychological study. Adopting the naturalistic approach, the early phenomenological as well as the analytical school have reacted to the antipsychologistic challange by eliminating subjective elements from the content of the mind. (shrink)

At first, I introduce two different paths, which lead from Husserl’s phenomenology to classical German philosophy : a. Psychologism: from Kant to the Logical Investigations through Fries, Beneke and Herbart; b. Idealism, from Fichte to Husserl’s late conception of philosophy as transcendental idealism). Then, I argue, in the first section, that Husserl’s transcendental turn after the Logical Investigations could be understood as a kind of idealism, deriving from Fichte. The next part deals mainly with phenomenology’s double meaning : as philosophia (...) perennis and as intentional psychology. First Philosophy asunderstood by Husserl is twofold: as Wissenschaftslehre (a science of all possible sciences) and as justification. I argue that phenomenology’s main contributions to philosophy lie in the concepts of justification and evidence and that intentional psychology plays an important role in that context, methodological as well as conceptual. 4. The final section is a discussion of what Husserl calls in the Krisis the “paradox of human subjectivity”, i.e. the relation between transcendental and empirical ego. The paper concludes with two remarks on foundationalism and intuition.J'introduis, dans un premier temps, deux voies différentes qui mènent de La phénoménologie husserlienne à la philosophie allemande classique: le psychologisme (de Kant aux Recherehes logiques), en passant par Fries, Beneke et Herbart; et l’idéalisme (de Fichte à la conception tardive, chez Husserl, de la philosophie en tant qu’idealisme transcendantal). Je soutiens, en premiere section, que le toumant transcendantal de Husserl apres les Recherehes logiques pourrait etre compris en tant qu’idéalisme, tributaire de Fichte. La seconde partie porte principalement sur la double signification de la phénoménologie: comme philosophia perennis et comme psychologie intentionnelle. Husserl entend la philosophie première de deux façons: en tant que Wissenschaftslehre (une science de toutes les sciences possibles) et en tant que justification. Je soutiens que la contribution principale de la phénoménologie se trouve dans les concepts de justification et d’evidence. La psychologie intentionnelle joue un rôle capital dans ce contexte, tant au niveau méthodologique que conceptuel. La troisième section représente une discussion de ce que Husserl appelle le «paradoxe de la subjectivité humaine»dans la Krisis, c’est-à-dire la relation entre l’ego transcendantal et empirique. Je conclus par deux remarques sur le fondationalisme et l’intuition. (shrink)

Logic and Time deals with Husserl’s response to “psychologism” in chapter 1. Chapter 2 explores the difference between Husserl’s and Descartes’s understanding of meaning. Chapter 3 discusses Husserl’s categorization of time and its importance for consciousness. Throughout the book Michalski describes Husserl’s philosophical development with regard to the discussed themes. Logic and Time concludes with a short Postscript stating the inclusion of historicity by the late Husserl.

This study is a revised version ofa book, published in February 1990 under the same title, as my Ph.D. thesis at the University of Stockholm. Revision of an earlier work poses specific problems, some of which deserve mentioning. After the appearance of the first version of this book new literature on related subjects and a new version of the principal HusserI text involved in the discussion have appeared. The newer literature contains both accounts of Twardowski's thought and its relations to (...) HusserI's philosophy, though without referring to my study from 1990, largely because the texts concerned were con ceived parallell to it, though published later, or independently of it. It would seem anachronistic, in this situation, to enter into new and ex tensive discussions with the authors of this literature. The choice made here has been to update the original study, adding references to texts published after my study, and to take account of points of views expressed. I have retained the major part of the basic information giv en in the 1990 version, although some of it might now be more famil iar to interested students than it was in 1990. (shrink)

In the 1890's, when fields such as psychology and philosophy were just emerging, turf wars between the disciplines were common-place. Philosophers widely discounted the possibility that psychology's claim to empirical truth had anything relevant to offer their field. And psychologists, such as the crazed and eccentric Otto Weinegger, often considered themselves philosophers. Freud, it is held, was deeply influenced by his wife, Martha's, uncle, who was also a philosopher. The tension between the fields persisted, until the two fields eventually matured (...) and grew apart. Until the publication of Martin Kursch's masterly work Psychologism , few philosophers and psychologists have attended to their originally unhappy, turn-of-the-century engagement. Martin Kusch explores the origins of psychologism in Germany and fin de siecle Vienna by examining two major figures of twentieth century philosophy: Frege and Husserl. As one of the few serious works on Frege, Kusch trenchantly and clearly reconstructs the debate and the context in which it flourished. Psychologism will prove to be a key work of intellectual history on a subject which has largely been overlooked and, above all, understudied. (shrink)

Since Quine has claimed that there is no absolute distinction between analytical and synthetical sentences the question whether logical laws might not be high order empirical laws about the ways humans actually think has become once more relevant. The affirmative answer was defended in the nineteenth century as the doctrine of psychologism. Frege and Husserl were vehemently opposed to this doctrine and many believe that they have destroyed it once and for all. This essay restates the doctrine of psychologism and (...) critically examines the counter arguments of Frege and Husserl. The conclusions reached are as follows: 1. Psychologism is a hard doctrine to state, because at its heart lies both a sceptical claim concerning the possibility of knowledge, in the strong sense of the word and a tendency towards idealism; 2. Frege defends the possibility of knowledge in the strong sense and ridicules the idealistic tendencies of psychologism but he cannot and does not refute the sceptical claims involved in any other than a polemical fashion; 3. Husserl tries to refute psychologism by attacking its roots: scepticism, but his sustained attempts are not successful; 4. Psychologism stands therefore unharmed by Frege and Husserl and is a viable, though perhaps unattractive philosophical option. The laws of logic might not be empirical claims about how humans think but they might be nevertheless empirical claims about how the world as a whole is cemented together. (shrink)

The thesis attempts to formulate a behavioristc definition of normativity based on proposals by B. F. Skinner in the context of a general analysis of the problem of reconciling psychology with normative science, especially logic. An introduction states the problem and briefly traces its historical roots. Chapter 1 traces modern acceptance of the view that psychology is irrelevant to normative science to Husserl's and Frege's victorious arguments against nineteenth century psychologism, and aims to show them inconclusive against modern psychologies through (...) an in-depth analysis of them, particularly Husserl's arguments. Chapter 2 develops a definition of behaviorism through a historical analysis of J. B. Watson's writings of 1913 and, more briefly, B. F. Skinner's relation to operationism and logical positivism. Chapter 3 extracts a definition of natural rationality from Skinner's conception of operant behavior through an analogy with Carnap's theory of two probabilities. Chapter 4 develops a cultural rationality condition from Skinner's theories of problem solving, rules, and behavioral and cultural evolution. Chapter 5 contains a review and conclusions. Five appendices cover incidental topics from the first two chapters: the problem of privacy in the arguments against psychologism, accusations against behavioristic ideology, Watson's role in the emergence of behaviorism, Bergmann's Watson, and the "image-type" controversy of 1913. (shrink)