The paper examines the roots of Husserlian phenomenology in Weierstrass's approach to analysis. After elaborating on Weierstrass's programme of arithmetization of analysis, the paper examines Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic as an attempt to provide foundations to analysis. The Philosophy of Arithmetic consists of two parts; the first discusses authentic arithmetic and the second symbolic arithmetic. Husserl's novelty is to use Brentanian descriptive analysis to clarify the fundamental concepts of arithmetic in the first part. In the second part, he founds the (...) symbolic extension of the authentically given arithmetic with stepwise symbolic operations. In the process of doing so, Husserl comes close to defining the modern concept of computability. The paper concludes with a brief comparison between Husserl and Frege. While Frege chose to subject arithmetic to logical analysis, Husserl wants to clarify arithmetic as it is given to us. Both engage in a kind of analysis, but while Frege analyses within Begriffsschrift, Husserl analyses our experiences. The difference in their methods of analysis is what ultimately grows into two separate schools in philosophy in the 20th century. (shrink)

Taking his point of departure from William James and, by implication, Franz Brentano, Alfred Schutz made explicit the multifaceted experience of sub-universes as a phenomenon for phenomenological clarification on an entirely different foundation from James, Brentano and Husserl. The rethinking of Brentano, James and Husserl makes the phenomenon explicit in such a way that a vast new domain of phenomenological investigation is opened up.

The main goal of the present paper is to offer a preliminary study of the relations between phenomenology and metaphysics in Husserl. After a brief presentation of what Husserl means by the term “metaphysics”, the rest of our research will consist of a detailed commentary on §60 of the Cartesian Meditations. Our aim is to explain in what sense, according to Husserl, the “outcomes” of the phenomenological constitution of monadological intersubjectivity entail the solution to a traditional metaphysical problem, i.e., that (...) of the existence of just one real world. The present investigation does not pretend to be more than an introduction. Besides shedding some light on a specific text, it will pave the way for a future inquiry into the relations between phenomenology and metaphysics in Husserl. (shrink)