Abstract
In a letter to Marvin Farber, Husserl wrote, “External ‘influences’ are without significance … Really, my course was already marked out by the Philosophic der Arithmetik, and I could do nothing other than to proceed further.”1 This self-interpretation on the part of Husserl is contradicted by a familiar account of Husserl’s philosophical development. According to this latter account, Husserl began with a “psychologists” philosophy of arithmetic in particular, but also of logic and epistemology. It was under Frege’s influence, especially as a consequence of Frege’s sharp 1894 review of his early work on the philosophy of arithmetic, that Husserl rejected his own psychologism, and was led to the conception of a pure logic. This widely accepted story has two further sidelights: in the first place, although eventually Husserl came to share Frege’s anti-psychologism, unlike Frege he thought he could logically refute psychologism while Frege neither refuted psychologism nor thought any such refutation possible without begging the issue. Secondly, in spite of the zealous anti-psychologism of the Prolegomena, Husserl had not understood the full force and all the implications of Frege’s philosophy of logic, and so, not surprisingly, relapsed into a version of psychologism which he dignified by the name “transcendental phenomenology.”
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References
M. Farber, The Foundation of Phenomenology, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1943, p. 17.
J.N. Mohanty, “Husserl and Frege: A New Look at their Relationship,” Research in Phenomenology, V, 1975; Reprinted in J.N. Mohanty (ed), Readings on Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1977, pp. 22–32.
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D. Willard, Studies in Husserl’s Early Philosophy (forthcoming), and J. Philip Miller, Numbers in Presence and Absence: A Study of Husserl’s Philosophy of Mathematics, The Hague, M. Nijhoff, 1982.
W.R. Boyce Gibson, “From Husserl to Heidegger: Excerpts from a 1928 Freiburg Diary,” ed. H. Spiegelberg, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 2, 1971, pp. 58–83.
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P. Natorp, “On the Question of LogicaT Method.” English translation by J.N. Mohanty, in Readings on Husserl’s Logical Investigations. The Hague: M. Nijhoff.
E. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, English translation by D. Cairns, The Hague: M. Nijhoff,1969, paragraph 57b.
M. Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books, 1973, p. 318.
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© 1984 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster
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Mohanty, J.N. (1984). Husserl, Frege and the Overcoming of Psychologism. In: Cho, K.K. (eds) Philosophy and Science in Phenomenological Perspective. Phaenomenologica, vol 95. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6113-5_11
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