Husserl's 1900-1901 Logical Investigations is the founding work of the phenomenological tradition — the two-volume reversal of his earlier psychologism that established meaning, logical inference, and conceptual content as objects of descriptive science in their essential rather than empirical structures.
logical-investigations
Husserl's two-volume 1900-1901 work that founded the phenomenological tradition by reversing his earlier psychologism and establishing the structures of meaning and conceptual content as the proper objects of a rigorous descriptive science.
Volume I (Prolegomena to Pure Logic) published 1900; Volume II (Investigations into the Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge) published 1901. Substantially revised in the second edition of 1913 and 1921.
Introduction
The Logical Investigations (German: Logische Untersuchungen) is the founding work of the phenomenological tradition and one of the most consequential works in twentieth-century philosophy. Published in two volumes in 1900 and 1901 by Edmund Husserl, the book reversed the psychologistic orientation of Husserl's earlier Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) and established the framework within which the phenomenological project would develop.
The book has two distinct parts. Volume I, the Prolegomena to Pure Logic, is the critique of psychologism — the position that the structures of logical inference can be reduced to the empirical psychology of human reasoning. Volume II, the Investigations into the Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge, consists of six investigations developing the positive phenomenological program: the analysis of expression and meaning, the analysis of universals, the theory of wholes and parts, the analysis of the difference between independent and dependent meanings, the analysis of intentional experience and its content, and the analysis of the elements of knowledge.
Composition and publication
Husserl's intellectual trajectory in the 1890s was marked by the development of doubts about the psychologistic framework of his early Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891). The review of that book by Gottlob Frege (1894) had attacked the psychologism substantially; Husserl had been working in the late 1890s on a reformulation. The result was the Logical Investigations, completed in 1899 and published in two volumes by Max Niemeyer in Halle.
The second edition of 1913 and 1921 revised the book in light of the intervening development of Husserl's thinking, especially through the publication of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (the Ideen, Book I) in 1913. The second-edition revisions incorporated the transcendental turn that the Ideen had introduced; the second edition is therefore not strictly continuous with the first, and scholarly disputes turn on which version to take as authoritative.
The standard German text is now in the Husserliana series (Husserliana XVIII for the Prolegomena, edited by Elmar Holenstein, 1975; Husserliana XIX/1 and XIX/2 for the six Investigations, edited by Ursula Panzer, 1984). The standard English translation is J. N. Findlay's two-volume edition (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, revised by Dermot Moran 2001), which follows the 1913 second edition.
Volume I: The critique of psychologism
The Prolegomena to Pure Logic (Volume I) is one of the most nineteenth-century critiques of psychologism in the philosophy of logic and mathematics. Psychologism, on Husserl's analysis, is the position that the laws of logic and the structures of conceptual content are reducible to laws of human psychology — the empirical regularities by which human minds actually operate. The position had been defended by John Stuart Mill, by Theodor Lipps, and by portions of late-nineteenth-century German philosophy.
Husserl's critique proceeds along several lines. First, the structural argument: the laws of logic are normative (they tell us how we ought to reason), while the laws of empirical psychology are descriptive (they tell us how we do reason); reducing the normative to the descriptive confuses two distinct kinds of law. Second, the modal argument: the laws of logic are necessary (they hold of all possible reasoning), while empirical psychological laws are contingent (they hold of the kind of reasoning humans actually engage in); the confusion of necessity with empirical generality is one of the fallacies of psychologism. Third, the relativist argument: if logic is reducible to empirical psychology, then logical truth becomes relative to the actual psychological structures of the inquirers; the result is a relativism that undermines the possibility of objective truth.
The critique was influential. The subsequent rejection of psychologism in twentieth-century analytic and continental philosophy descends from the Logical Investigations. Frege had made a parallel critique in his Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and elsewhere, but Husserl's argumentation was more extensive and more sustained.
Volume II: The six investigations
The six investigations of Volume II develop the positive phenomenological program. Each investigation takes a particular topic in the philosophy of logic, meaning, and knowledge and develops the phenomenological analysis.
First Investigation: Expression and Meaning
The analysis of linguistic expression and its meaning. Husserl distinguishes the expression (the spoken or written sign), the meaning-intending act (the conscious act by which the expression is given its meaning), and the meaning itself (the abstract content that the act intends). The framework anticipates portions of subsequent philosophy of language.
Second Investigation: The Ideal Unity of the Species and Modern Theories of Abstraction
The critique of the empiricist and nominalist accounts of universals through Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Mill, and the defense of a non-Platonic account of species as ideal unities given in acts of abstraction.
Third Investigation: On the Theory of Wholes and Parts
The development of a formal mereology — the theory of parts and wholes. Husserl distinguishes independent and dependent parts (parts that can or cannot exist without their wholes); the framework anticipates twentieth-century formal mereology.
Fourth Investigation: On the Theory of Grammar
The development of a pure grammar that distinguishes the structural requirements that any meaningful expression must satisfy from empirical regularities of particular languages. The framework anticipates twentieth-century work on semantic categories and grammatical structure.
Fifth Investigation: On Intentional Experiences and their Contents
The central investigation, developing the analysis of intentionality — the directedness of consciousness toward an object. The distinction between the act of intending and the content of the act, and the distinction between qualities and matters of intentional acts, provides the framework within which subsequent phenomenology operates.
Sixth Investigation: Elements of a Phenomenological Elucidation of Knowledge
The development of the analysis of fulfillment — the relation between an empty intentional act (an act that intends an object without yet experiencing it directly) and a fulfilling intentional act (an act that experiences the intended object directly). The framework provides the phenomenological analysis of knowledge.
Reception
The immediate reception was substantial. The Logical Investigations established Husserl as a major philosophical figure and attracted the group of students at Göttingen (Reinach, Conrad-Martius, Ingarden, Koyré, and others) that constituted the early phenomenological school. The impact on the subsequent generation of European philosophers was substantial.
The transcendental turn of the Ideen (1913) modified the relationship between the Investigations and Husserl's mature program. The Göttingen students who had been drawn to the descriptive phenomenology of the Investigations were divided over whether to follow Husserl into the transcendental framework or to preserve the realist phenomenology that the Investigations had seemed to support. The second-edition revisions (1913, 1921) incorporated the transcendental framework and complicated the reception.
The influence on subsequent analytic philosophy of language has been substantial. Frege engaged the book substantially; the Vienna Circle (especially Carnap) engaged it; the subsequent analytic engagement with intentionality through John Searle, Hubert Dreyfus, Dagfinn Føllesdal, and others has returned to the Investigations.
Place in the wiki
The Logical Investigations is the founding work of the phenomenological tradition and one of the most consequential works in the philosophy of logic and meaning of the modern period. It is the principal source for Husserl's critique of psychologism, for the framework of intentionality that structures subsequent phenomenology, and for the methodological orientation that distinguishes phenomenology from psychology and from the analytic philosophy of language.
Further reading
- Husserl — the author
- Phenomenology — the tradition the book founded
- Frege — the contemporary whose parallel critique of psychologism anticipated Husserl's
- Heidegger — the major student whose work developed the tradition
- Being and Time — the major Heideggerian extension of phenomenology
Husserl's 1900-1901 founding work of the phenomenological tradition. The critique of psychologism and the framework within which subsequent phenomenology operates.