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Logical Investigations, Volume 1
Edmund Husserl is the founder of phenomenology and the Logical Investigations is his most famous work. It had a decisive impact on twentieth century philosophy and is one of few works to have influenced both continental and analytic philosophy.
This is the first time both volumes have been available in paperback. They include a new introduction by Dermot Moran, placing the Investigations in historical context and bringing out their contemporary philosophical importance.
These editions include a new preface by Sir Michael Dummett.
This is the first time both volumes have been available in paperback. They include a new introduction by Dermot Moran, placing the Investigations in historical context and bringing out their contemporary philosophical importance.
These editions include a new preface by Sir Michael Dummett.
425 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1900
51 people are currently reading
1595 people want to read
About the author
Edmund Husserl
519 books543 followersEdmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (Dr. phil. hab., University of Halle-Wittenberg, 1887; Ph.D., Mathematics, University of Vienna, 1883) was a philosopher who is deemed the founder of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, believing that experience is the source of all knowledge, while at the same time he elaborated critiques of psychologism and historicism.
Born into a Moravian Jewish family, he was baptized as a Lutheran in 1887. Husserl studied mathematics under Karl Weierstrass, completing a Ph.D. under Leo Königsberger, and studied philosophy under Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. Husserl taught philosophy, as a Privatdozent at Halle from 1887, then as professor, first at Göttingen from 1901, then at Freiburg im Breisgau from 1916 until his 1928 retirement.
Born into a Moravian Jewish family, he was baptized as a Lutheran in 1887. Husserl studied mathematics under Karl Weierstrass, completing a Ph.D. under Leo Königsberger, and studied philosophy under Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. Husserl taught philosophy, as a Privatdozent at Halle from 1887, then as professor, first at Göttingen from 1901, then at Freiburg im Breisgau from 1916 until his 1928 retirement.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
February 6, 2015
A very dense book, but extremely valuable on the construction of a deep and systematic criticism against the foundation of logic as given by the psychologism. This was my first direct reading of Husserl and I will certainly return to various points and to my own notes. As a source of study for many years, I highly recommend it. It is not the kind of book that you read only once. The reader will normally have to return to some sections and re-read them with a note pad and pen at the side to submerge into Husserl magestic chain of arguments.
September 24, 2017
The annihilating crux of Husserl is nearly impossible to reccomend to anyone due to its incapacity for either summary or overview, on the other hand because anyone in the field is either making a phenomenological living by trysting means of surgical revelation. The saintly statues of olde and tomorrow's scientist both look like they're in the process of supplanting the life giving seed through exterior morphological epiphany. Hence Husserl is known for what he spawned, and spawn he did. But unlike mere music, one cannot simply buy a book by Husserl and leave it out as a planted pseudoaccidental conversation starter. Logical Investigations cannot be mentioned in passing, like an oil painting in progress, regardless of how long the artist's armpit hair has grown; for at the ontological end of artwork as perceived-concept we come full hermeneutical circle in the converging concentrated childishness of with inflated opium, i.e. whereby the infantile core of artistry parallels narcotic lure in tanking literal and interior economies. Art criticism is but inundated footnotes arranged by height for the reaching child. That which is popular is both demanded popular by forced selection unto presentation and the collective unconscious modality amidst viewers in witnessing the elaborate fleshing out of pre-concept, which is to say birth-memory-driven yearning in mystery. The investigations must have a guiding principle for the condemned reader to not risk psychic injury. To get somewhere with this heavy liquid is an irreversible feat of illumination. To blast away at ancient walls with supplanted, inquisitive dynamite, only to turn back before getting to the core does not make one a lesser human being. The fact that we die ought to force us into slowing down in a simultaneously technological and technocratic sense, but it doesn't. Not wanting to burn one's mind is fair, albeit indicactive of insufficient episticpreparations. This is not for the faint of heart. Destroy your digital identity and jump into the fire if you are one of billions looking for something to do. Or, emulate Ezekiel and consume this book as food. That or write a short story about it and publish it with a little known journal for free. One of the three. Choose wisely.
June 27, 2014
The Logical Investigations by Edmund Husserl are necessary to read if you are interested in Phenomenology, the history of Philosophy, the development of Husserl's thought, or perennial questions on the foundations and objectivity of Logic. Four good reasons to read this!
While I cringe to say it since I find Derrida's readings highly questionable, this could be of interest to those looking to get a better background for reading Derrida's work which is built on readings of Husserl. In this work Husserl makes the distinction between expressions and indications that Derrida will later plant the bomb of Husserl's own Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness underneath it in order to undermine the dream for presence and inaugurate Deconstruction.
While the work is technical and complex, there are plenty of insights and gems to be found in the Prolegomena and the six Investigations regardless of the school of Philosophy you may fit into.
While I cringe to say it since I find Derrida's readings highly questionable, this could be of interest to those looking to get a better background for reading Derrida's work which is built on readings of Husserl. In this work Husserl makes the distinction between expressions and indications that Derrida will later plant the bomb of Husserl's own Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness underneath it in order to undermine the dream for presence and inaugurate Deconstruction.
While the work is technical and complex, there are plenty of insights and gems to be found in the Prolegomena and the six Investigations regardless of the school of Philosophy you may fit into.
Read
May 4, 2016Prior to reading the first part of this book, the "Prolegomena to Pure Logic," I never gave much thought to the foundations of logic and science, but Husserl's unwonted short and snappy polemical arguments showed me that there are fundamentally relativist commitments in thinking that logic is simply psychological, the product of the human mind, as I probably would have answered if anyone ever asked me how logic is possible. Interestingly enough, psychologism seemed to come back in style, in American philosophy anyway, e.g., in Peirce's claim that logic is a normative science, and especially with the publication of Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" paper, in which he says that we can adjust any mathematical and logical rules come what may. With these arguments, it becomes difficult to accept Husserl's argument for the existence of pure ideal laws of logic. But, then again, how is it that the identity of indiscernibles was as true in Leibniz's time as it is now?
January 18, 2025
Phenomenology’s best cases are maths and logic. Yet, I view even them, let alone meaning and abstraction, as profoundly psychological and conventional.
January 13, 2025
It is not an easy read. However, there are several things that Husserl developed that remain true, even if not well understood. Principally, the ontological difference between ideal concepts and intuitions. Artificial intelligence is, in fact, the greatest evidence of this discovery (there must be a test for IA to check if it has meaning-intentions). He also made some advances in information theory (mutual information) when he discussed the dependency of things, even if there is no causality or correlation. This is a point he later confuses, and the introductory analysis made the same mistake. However, dependency without any correlation or causality was a new way to see the relations in complex settings.
June 15, 2024
Logical Investigations, Volume I (1901)
Contemporary scholars who conducted intensive study on Husserl can be divided into two general camps; the Continental and Insular camps. The former, whose epitome is Dan Zahavi conceived Husserl as constructing metaphysical ideas; i.e. a radical new way in understanding reality, as shown by his emerging traces of transcendental idealism even in the Investigations. The latter, represented by Dermot Moran and others, conceived Husserl as constructing only a methodical approach, a giant against psychologism. Husserl’s brilliance, for them, lies in his critique against psychologism, the West’s last heavening against the dualism of Descartes. Husserl's emerging “mystical” suggestions are reduced to acceptable artistic or persuasive license.
My readers might already anticipate that I am more persuaded by the Continental reading of Husserl. We can appreciate how all great Western minds, from Spinoza to Wittgenstein, who at the height of their analysis, caught a glimpse of the Ideality. Husserl indeed, even as when he was writing the Logical Investigations as a declaration of allegiance towards the analytical and positivistic philosophy, already saw the only viable solution to save the objectivity of the World and Knowledge is to appeal for the a priori, instead of masochistically condemning himself to the perpetual inductive trap. The Continental reading also allows me to resonate Husserl’s ideas with other philosophers of Being such as, Sadra and al-Attas, whose similarities can be seen the more we read their works.
Already in the Prolegomena of Pure Logic, in a celebrated passage, Husserl declared that the individual singular redness is an instantiated moment of the ideal Redness. While the experience of the red apple in my hand arises and passes away, nothing can take away from the guarantee that I was indeed holding a red apple in my hand, as what has been instantiated in the experience, in reality originated from the Ideal and not from the real (phenomenal).
But how Husserl built his argument in the Logical Investigation?
He began with a completely labyrinthine exposition on signs. To summarize, all signs indicate something without an exception, but they can be either with sense or without sense. The word “Abracadabra”, “golden mountain”, “round circle” all indicate something, but in the first instance it posits nothing more than the articulation of the sound-complex, and thus without any sense beyond mere indicating towards the sound. The second instance possesses sense, as we can perfectly put it in a theater or a movie, but its objective correlation is non-existent. Even the round circle possessed sense, as it had to be presented in my mind in order for me to refute the concept. Thus, Husserl insisted that there’s a distinction between the conferring of meaning (which is present in the 2nd and 3rd case), and fulfillment of meaning (which present in our daily activities).
But how can a name correspond to a meaning it intended?
While a name is indeed a verbal articulation, it does not arise haphazardly. We can imagine the first speaker, who has a mental state it wishes to express, used a certain verbal articulation which we called as signs. And the hearer, who heard and saw the speaker is gesticulating a certain verbal and action gesture, intimated that the gestures are not mere signs, but also an expression that provides a content beyond the mere signs. The intimating function, in a way, resonated the hearer and the speaker with the mental experience wished to share. But, the meaning cannot be understood if the hearer only identifies that the speaker is trying to convey a mental experience, but he also has to also resonate with what the speaker wants to actually convery. Thus, the intimating function of the expressions allow the hearer approximating to the meaning the speaker wants to convery, in a method not different from Levy-Bruhl’s idea of “participation mystique”, but what the hearer understood surely does not arise from the mere gestures, but in his intuitive grasping of what the speaker wished to share. In the same way, when anyone who met the round object with a rectangular post for the first time, would be inclined to kick it towards the post like football, rather than throwing it overhead like in netball, or even eating it.
Meaning behind names, thus, operates on certain rules, which is shared publicly, and impossible to be derived from experience, as it intimates what is given beyond the physical experience i.e. the mental experience between the speaker and the hearer. There must be something ideal behind the construction of language, which is nothing more than articulation of thoughts. It is only philosophers who cannot understand what is a ball, love and conscience, while everyone readily grasps the ideas without fail.
And thus, what allows meaning to be understood universally is the Ideal, not what has been inductively understood from experience. We can even imagine if the speaker lived on an isolated island, far from any person, can preserve the meaning of the thoughts he had, even without the need to recourse to verbal signs. We can even imagine, if the speaker has passed to the void, the meaning would retain its meaning, as much as the speaker does not invent the meaning of the thoughts, but rather merely discovers it. Thus, meaning is derived from Ideal laws of thoughts, names are mere articulation of it, but necessarily connected to the meaning of the name, as what is understood between speakers is not the phenomenal word, but the meaning intimated from it.
We can immediately show how impossible to throw skepticism towards name and meaning by showing a thought-experiment by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. Imagine if there’s a chap who wanted to be unique, decided to construct a private language. He created complicated signs and poured his thoughts through that language. When his friend approached him and asked to teach how to read his language, our builder taught how these signs correspond to thus and thus, and to his surprise, his friend can immediately apply the rule and learn his language! He is not that unique, after all. There’s no private language as language is built on rules learning, which is communally shared by everyone universally. One can insist that no one can feel his pain, but he cannot strictly deny that everyone understands that he is in pain. The best picture of a man’s soul is his body, as Wittgenstein would say.
And thus, we intuitively grasp the meaning behind the names, as externally language is a rule-learning mechanism, and internally we intuitively grasp meaning through Ideal expressions, rather than estimating it. But how can the meaning and the name correspond to its objective correlates?
As we mentioned above, a thing can possess sense even if it is objectless, as obvious when we are talking about a golden mountain or a round circle. Sense can be defined, thus, as a consciousness of possibility of fulfillment, and that’s why we can apprehend the notion of the aforementioned golden mountain. But not all sense-meaning possessed intuitive fulfillment i.e. can be given in propria persona. In the First Investigation, Husserl has not mentioned on the mechanism how the sense-meaning is being fulfilled, but as hinted in my previous post on Husserl’s Prolegomena to Pure Logic, the sense-meaning is necessarily being fulfilled as it is merely intensification of the instantiation of Idealities to the same sense-meaning.
Thus, the sense-meaning being conceived in its utterly poverty state i.e. to only possess sheer meaning with total devoid of sensuous accompaniment, can be expanded to possess imaginative qualities such as color, scent, memory-trace et cetera, and lastly to be given in propria persona. These different modes of existence of symbolic, imaginative and intuitive constellates on a single sense-meaning (upon a transcendental object, which is mentioned much way later), which gradually being fulfilled by an increasing gradation of Ideals; red as potential, red as thought, red as being given in propria persona. Through this complex yet beautiful model, Husserl preserved the objectivity of both objects of thoughts (which is not accurate, only mentioned as thus here for understanding. Husserl insisted that objects of thoughts par excellence i.e. concepts and reflection are already contaminated with real contents, thus its articulation are concerned more on individual’s judgment, not a phenomenological analysis which focuses on the essential framework of the spontaneous consciousness) and the objects of Reality.
Now, moving on to the Second Volume of the Logical Investigations.
Contemporary scholars who conducted intensive study on Husserl can be divided into two general camps; the Continental and Insular camps. The former, whose epitome is Dan Zahavi conceived Husserl as constructing metaphysical ideas; i.e. a radical new way in understanding reality, as shown by his emerging traces of transcendental idealism even in the Investigations. The latter, represented by Dermot Moran and others, conceived Husserl as constructing only a methodical approach, a giant against psychologism. Husserl’s brilliance, for them, lies in his critique against psychologism, the West’s last heavening against the dualism of Descartes. Husserl's emerging “mystical” suggestions are reduced to acceptable artistic or persuasive license.
My readers might already anticipate that I am more persuaded by the Continental reading of Husserl. We can appreciate how all great Western minds, from Spinoza to Wittgenstein, who at the height of their analysis, caught a glimpse of the Ideality. Husserl indeed, even as when he was writing the Logical Investigations as a declaration of allegiance towards the analytical and positivistic philosophy, already saw the only viable solution to save the objectivity of the World and Knowledge is to appeal for the a priori, instead of masochistically condemning himself to the perpetual inductive trap. The Continental reading also allows me to resonate Husserl’s ideas with other philosophers of Being such as, Sadra and al-Attas, whose similarities can be seen the more we read their works.
Already in the Prolegomena of Pure Logic, in a celebrated passage, Husserl declared that the individual singular redness is an instantiated moment of the ideal Redness. While the experience of the red apple in my hand arises and passes away, nothing can take away from the guarantee that I was indeed holding a red apple in my hand, as what has been instantiated in the experience, in reality originated from the Ideal and not from the real (phenomenal).
But how Husserl built his argument in the Logical Investigation?
He began with a completely labyrinthine exposition on signs. To summarize, all signs indicate something without an exception, but they can be either with sense or without sense. The word “Abracadabra”, “golden mountain”, “round circle” all indicate something, but in the first instance it posits nothing more than the articulation of the sound-complex, and thus without any sense beyond mere indicating towards the sound. The second instance possesses sense, as we can perfectly put it in a theater or a movie, but its objective correlation is non-existent. Even the round circle possessed sense, as it had to be presented in my mind in order for me to refute the concept. Thus, Husserl insisted that there’s a distinction between the conferring of meaning (which is present in the 2nd and 3rd case), and fulfillment of meaning (which present in our daily activities).
But how can a name correspond to a meaning it intended?
While a name is indeed a verbal articulation, it does not arise haphazardly. We can imagine the first speaker, who has a mental state it wishes to express, used a certain verbal articulation which we called as signs. And the hearer, who heard and saw the speaker is gesticulating a certain verbal and action gesture, intimated that the gestures are not mere signs, but also an expression that provides a content beyond the mere signs. The intimating function, in a way, resonated the hearer and the speaker with the mental experience wished to share. But, the meaning cannot be understood if the hearer only identifies that the speaker is trying to convey a mental experience, but he also has to also resonate with what the speaker wants to actually convery. Thus, the intimating function of the expressions allow the hearer approximating to the meaning the speaker wants to convery, in a method not different from Levy-Bruhl’s idea of “participation mystique”, but what the hearer understood surely does not arise from the mere gestures, but in his intuitive grasping of what the speaker wished to share. In the same way, when anyone who met the round object with a rectangular post for the first time, would be inclined to kick it towards the post like football, rather than throwing it overhead like in netball, or even eating it.
Meaning behind names, thus, operates on certain rules, which is shared publicly, and impossible to be derived from experience, as it intimates what is given beyond the physical experience i.e. the mental experience between the speaker and the hearer. There must be something ideal behind the construction of language, which is nothing more than articulation of thoughts. It is only philosophers who cannot understand what is a ball, love and conscience, while everyone readily grasps the ideas without fail.
And thus, what allows meaning to be understood universally is the Ideal, not what has been inductively understood from experience. We can even imagine if the speaker lived on an isolated island, far from any person, can preserve the meaning of the thoughts he had, even without the need to recourse to verbal signs. We can even imagine, if the speaker has passed to the void, the meaning would retain its meaning, as much as the speaker does not invent the meaning of the thoughts, but rather merely discovers it. Thus, meaning is derived from Ideal laws of thoughts, names are mere articulation of it, but necessarily connected to the meaning of the name, as what is understood between speakers is not the phenomenal word, but the meaning intimated from it.
We can immediately show how impossible to throw skepticism towards name and meaning by showing a thought-experiment by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. Imagine if there’s a chap who wanted to be unique, decided to construct a private language. He created complicated signs and poured his thoughts through that language. When his friend approached him and asked to teach how to read his language, our builder taught how these signs correspond to thus and thus, and to his surprise, his friend can immediately apply the rule and learn his language! He is not that unique, after all. There’s no private language as language is built on rules learning, which is communally shared by everyone universally. One can insist that no one can feel his pain, but he cannot strictly deny that everyone understands that he is in pain. The best picture of a man’s soul is his body, as Wittgenstein would say.
And thus, we intuitively grasp the meaning behind the names, as externally language is a rule-learning mechanism, and internally we intuitively grasp meaning through Ideal expressions, rather than estimating it. But how can the meaning and the name correspond to its objective correlates?
As we mentioned above, a thing can possess sense even if it is objectless, as obvious when we are talking about a golden mountain or a round circle. Sense can be defined, thus, as a consciousness of possibility of fulfillment, and that’s why we can apprehend the notion of the aforementioned golden mountain. But not all sense-meaning possessed intuitive fulfillment i.e. can be given in propria persona. In the First Investigation, Husserl has not mentioned on the mechanism how the sense-meaning is being fulfilled, but as hinted in my previous post on Husserl’s Prolegomena to Pure Logic, the sense-meaning is necessarily being fulfilled as it is merely intensification of the instantiation of Idealities to the same sense-meaning.
Thus, the sense-meaning being conceived in its utterly poverty state i.e. to only possess sheer meaning with total devoid of sensuous accompaniment, can be expanded to possess imaginative qualities such as color, scent, memory-trace et cetera, and lastly to be given in propria persona. These different modes of existence of symbolic, imaginative and intuitive constellates on a single sense-meaning (upon a transcendental object, which is mentioned much way later), which gradually being fulfilled by an increasing gradation of Ideals; red as potential, red as thought, red as being given in propria persona. Through this complex yet beautiful model, Husserl preserved the objectivity of both objects of thoughts (which is not accurate, only mentioned as thus here for understanding. Husserl insisted that objects of thoughts par excellence i.e. concepts and reflection are already contaminated with real contents, thus its articulation are concerned more on individual’s judgment, not a phenomenological analysis which focuses on the essential framework of the spontaneous consciousness) and the objects of Reality.
Now, moving on to the Second Volume of the Logical Investigations.
August 17, 2022
Husserl in this book critiques a view that he called “psychologism”, which, according to him, the primary proponent was John Stuart Mill. This view essentially states that logic exists in human minds and is a product of the human psyche, and therefore, it’s basis is not solid. To put it in another, more Kantian way, logic, due to being accessible to humans, is a faculty of the human mind and is a part of the phenomena, rather than the nomena, or the actual world.
With this said, I started reading this work, since Husserl is considered to be the father of phenomenonlogy and a significant figure in modern philosophy. After having read this book, I’m not sure what the hype was about.
There is a bit of skepticism involved towards the basic rules and confides of logic, but he doesn’t really propose a better system to overtake it. So essentially, it becomes a work of skepticism of empiricism model, which ultimately doesn’t bear much fruit, since we still have to live and try to figure things out. We know that logic generally works, more or less, so long as the inputs (built in assumptions) are correct. But this book is not actually as rigorous as it seems. Essentially, his critique can be said to be that logic and epistemology in general ideally would have a former root and basis than it does. Sure, I and others can readily agree with him on that, but he doesn’t have a real solution (and the book could be much, much shorter as a result, and there’s a lot of rambling, more or less, and confused thoughts and dead-ends, where he doesn’t really address the issue at hand of how he proposes to root out logic from psychologism and root it into some place more stable, and what the benefits of his new system are vs. the old system.
Not to mention that Kant already did much of what he is proposing he wants to do in the Critique of Pure Reason (and many other things as well).
All in all, I personally wasn’t as impressed, and believe there are better philosophy books out there than this.
With this said, I started reading this work, since Husserl is considered to be the father of phenomenonlogy and a significant figure in modern philosophy. After having read this book, I’m not sure what the hype was about.
There is a bit of skepticism involved towards the basic rules and confides of logic, but he doesn’t really propose a better system to overtake it. So essentially, it becomes a work of skepticism of empiricism model, which ultimately doesn’t bear much fruit, since we still have to live and try to figure things out. We know that logic generally works, more or less, so long as the inputs (built in assumptions) are correct. But this book is not actually as rigorous as it seems. Essentially, his critique can be said to be that logic and epistemology in general ideally would have a former root and basis than it does. Sure, I and others can readily agree with him on that, but he doesn’t have a real solution (and the book could be much, much shorter as a result, and there’s a lot of rambling, more or less, and confused thoughts and dead-ends, where he doesn’t really address the issue at hand of how he proposes to root out logic from psychologism and root it into some place more stable, and what the benefits of his new system are vs. the old system.
Not to mention that Kant already did much of what he is proposing he wants to do in the Critique of Pure Reason (and many other things as well).
All in all, I personally wasn’t as impressed, and believe there are better philosophy books out there than this.
June 16, 2009
Husserl is a tough read, with rewards for the reader who endures. His work offers a method for the complete deconstruction of experience into its component parts, so that experience may be analyzed, our intellectual experience of those experiences and any prejudicial assumptions identified and explored.
March 22, 2009
A bit dense, with incredibly long and difficult sentences. However, completing the two volumes is incredibly rewarding. Although I'm still very unclear on his views and arguments, Husserl offers a very interesting theory of phenomenology that is often intuitively compelling. I recommend it to all serious philosophers.
October 22, 2013
Too difficult for me.
January 12, 2025
In fact I only read the "new introduction by Dermot Moran, placing the Investigations in historical context and bringing out their contemporary philosophical importance" mentioned in the Goodreads blurb - it was a free Kindle sample.
Husserl is a common reference point and/or nexus for a bunch of philosophers I've been interested in: Heidegger and Derrida, and to some extent the post-Fregean analytical Anglo-American tradition, Husserl and Frege (among other big names in the field at the time) having corresponded and debated.
The problem for me, I've noticed, is that Husserl's writing is extremely abstract, plus his views seem to change constantly, not necessarily matched by changes in terminology; the effect is that often one has barely any idea what he's talking about, much less what he's saying about it. This kind of problem is arguably endemic in all philosophy, but it seems acute in Husserl.
And this introduction, while probably more comprehensible than the unexpurgated Edmund, is also necessarily very schematic. It goes some way to situating Husserl in the streams of European thought, and makes it clear - if just by the range of names of his admirers, from Russell to Heidegger for instance - that he's no phoney; but it does little to clarify what he had to say. As I recall, Derrida's 'Speech and Phenomena' did cast some partial light on this fairly key question (though the intro says that JD's interpretation has been disputed, inevitably). I don't know whether I have enough time left to spare the necessary to get to grips with all this.
But if you're young and healthy and full of curiosity about our most basic concepts, go for it, I say.
Husserl is a common reference point and/or nexus for a bunch of philosophers I've been interested in: Heidegger and Derrida, and to some extent the post-Fregean analytical Anglo-American tradition, Husserl and Frege (among other big names in the field at the time) having corresponded and debated.
The problem for me, I've noticed, is that Husserl's writing is extremely abstract, plus his views seem to change constantly, not necessarily matched by changes in terminology; the effect is that often one has barely any idea what he's talking about, much less what he's saying about it. This kind of problem is arguably endemic in all philosophy, but it seems acute in Husserl.
And this introduction, while probably more comprehensible than the unexpurgated Edmund, is also necessarily very schematic. It goes some way to situating Husserl in the streams of European thought, and makes it clear - if just by the range of names of his admirers, from Russell to Heidegger for instance - that he's no phoney; but it does little to clarify what he had to say. As I recall, Derrida's 'Speech and Phenomena' did cast some partial light on this fairly key question (though the intro says that JD's interpretation has been disputed, inevitably). I don't know whether I have enough time left to spare the necessary to get to grips with all this.
But if you're young and healthy and full of curiosity about our most basic concepts, go for it, I say.
March 5, 2023
يهدف هوسرل فى الجزء الأول من بحوثه المنطقية الى إرساء فكرة امكانية منطق محض ليست النسقية الا تابع بديهى له ، وانما المنطق كعلم للعلم او كنظرية موحدة لكافة العلوم هى نظرية النظريات التى تكون كل نظرية علمية خاصة على صورتها .
ويضطر الكاتب تبعا لذلك ان يخصص هذا الجزء لدحض المزاعم القائلة بتفرع المنطق عن السيكولوجيا ويبين هوسرل بأناة شديدة ما تنطوى عليه هذه المزاعم من خلف يهدم كل محاولة لتأسيس نظرية حقيقية فى المعرفة ، اى نظرية شاملة يمكن منها استنباط التعالقات المعرفية النظرية بشكل مباشر والتى تعمل على ربط كافة العلوم بشكل قبلى والتى تكون أداة معيارية فى صياغة النظريات العلمية الجزئية فى كليتها ، ومن ثم فى تعينها الفردى الحر فى التجربة المعيشة .
ولا بد هنا من التيقن من مثالية الفكر فى مواجهة موضوعه الذى هو العلم . فهل يمكن للفكر ان يوحد شتات موضوعه . هذه هى المسألة التى اذا تحققت تأسست معها نظرية معرفية موضوعية . وتكون صورة العلم الشامل فى نسقيتها هى صورة الفكر لذاته وقد تحققت فى ذاته اى فى ماهيته الواحدة بشكل مثالى تام .
ويضطر الكاتب تبعا لذلك ان يخصص هذا الجزء لدحض المزاعم القائلة بتفرع المنطق عن السيكولوجيا ويبين هوسرل بأناة شديدة ما تنطوى عليه هذه المزاعم من خلف يهدم كل محاولة لتأسيس نظرية حقيقية فى المعرفة ، اى نظرية شاملة يمكن منها استنباط التعالقات المعرفية النظرية بشكل مباشر والتى تعمل على ربط كافة العلوم بشكل قبلى والتى تكون أداة معيارية فى صياغة النظريات العلمية الجزئية فى كليتها ، ومن ثم فى تعينها الفردى الحر فى التجربة المعيشة .
ولا بد هنا من التيقن من مثالية الفكر فى مواجهة موضوعه الذى هو العلم . فهل يمكن للفكر ان يوحد شتات موضوعه . هذه هى المسألة التى اذا تحققت تأسست معها نظرية معرفية موضوعية . وتكون صورة العلم الشامل فى نسقيتها هى صورة الفكر لذاته وقد تحققت فى ذاته اى فى ماهيته الواحدة بشكل مثالى تام .
November 26, 2023
Genius deconstruction of psychologism. The beautiful idea that norms of thought are derived from laws of thought, and that the laws of thoughts arise from the possible meaning contained in propositional content. The basic relationship is between ground and corollary, and this relationship must be apprehensible through intentional acts aimed at intentional contents. So far we have noesis and content. These are not reducible to individual-psychological minds. Super important work. Will continue with Volume 2 at some point.
January 11, 2026
The most joyless this-author-loves-the-ink-of-their-own-pen type reading experience I can remember living through. Important and even interesting in substance, but something of a philosophical-literary misdemeanour.
January 5, 2024
Editing could've saved it
December 16, 2013
This work reads like journal entries over time and in accord with the nature of Husserl's philosophy (which is dense and dry), it makes it a challenging work to unravel. The theory of phenomenology is intuitively compelling though, and with patience, one will glean a much rewarding insight.
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February 20, 2016Difficult and strange
May 17, 2017
كتاب عميق جدا استعصى على ذهني كثيرا
November 28, 2021
almost entirely bullshit
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