What do you think?
Rate this book
Logical Investigations, Volume 2
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.
380 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1901
14 people are currently reading
681 people want to read
About the author
Edmund Husserl
523 books549 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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 10, 2019
I read Investigation V, and while brilliant it was absolutely brutal reading. But you do begin to understand why Husserl is Husserl.
Read
April 28, 2016Today I was sitting in my year-long seminar on the Investigations, listening to eager graduate students rhapsodize about non-objectifying acts as apparent fulfillments of meaning, categorial forming, and the a priori laws of authentic and inauthentic thinking, when I realized that my understanding of this book has diminished with each chapter, starting with a kind of approving curiosity at the Prolegomena, and, at the close of the sixth investigation, ending up with a feeling akin to how Russell and Moore felt at the turn of the 20th century: hungry for a kind of conceptual clarity and semblance of discernible REALITY that British Hegelianism (or, Husserlian phenomenology) just could not provide. Maybe first-person experience of phenomena just doesn't lend itself to scientific study as an isolated entity...maybe phenomenology is not as viable a research program as Husserl, the perpetual beginner, led me to believe...
January 24, 2025
Husserl extends his logic from maths & meaning (Vol. 1) to ontology & consciousness (Vol. 2). It’s suggestive, but the project is flawed, esp. the scope given to the a priori.
July 12, 2024
It must have been a mystery why I exerted myself so much in writing long posts on obscure topics. It is certainly not due to the allure of popularity, for that I long forsake it since I acknowledged my tendency towards the internal framework behind everything, instead of focusing the more overt sciences such as political science, popular science et cetera.
But it is to actually silence my silent thoughts. For every thoughts wished to be born, and to smell the scent of consciousness, instead of reveling in the dark. Its gratification belongs to its expression, and not its celebration by the many. It is suffice that the only ones who read upon my meanderings would be myself and the Symparanekromenoi; my League of Shadows.
***
The thematic reading of Husserl has arrived to its Fifth Part with this post. I planned to read majority of Husserl’s works as a project for myself this year, as I have scoured the works of al-Attas, Kant, Schopenhauer and many others in the previous years. I included here the links to the previous parts:
1. Part I: Husserl’s Phenomenology by Dan Zahavi: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?stor...
2. Part II: Prolegomena to Pure Logic (1900): https://m.facebook.com/story.php?stor...
3. Part III: Logical Investigations, Volume I (1901): https://m.facebook.com/story.php?stor...
4. Part IV: Logical Investigations, Volume II (1901), Investigations III and IV: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?stor...
***
I believed, when Husserl first started on the Prolegomena to the Logical Investigations, he never knew that his initial intention to disprove psychologism would end up as a full-blown rewriting on epistemology. His subject is much more complex, almost to the point of being unreadable at certain passages, and it is understandable, for he undertook a step forward than Kant.
Kant’s mission was to debunk Hume’s empiricism which he feared would throw the entire mission of knowledge into subjectivism. His magnum opus is essentially that: it’s a critique. His entire thesis is to propose the idea of transcendental idealism in response against Hume. His exposition on the transcendental form of sensibility and understanding built from his direct predecessors of Wolff, and more ambivalently, Leibniz.
But Husserl is essentially paving an entire new pathway. While Kant’s critique addressed the possible object of cognition, Husserl investigated the essential framework of consciousness that allows the very possibility of cognition. Kant’s project inevitably ended up with a negative statement; that Humean empiricism can be thrashed, but at the cost of the necessary implausibility regarding the knowing of the noumenon. Husserl, on the other hand, as we will see below contributed a positive thesis on the structure of consciousness and its role in guaranteeing the objectivity of the World.
***
At the beginning of the Investigation V, Husserl noted that even as he imagining about the idea of the deity Jupiter and a real person in front of him to have no essential difference in their givenness to us. They only differ at the level of fulfilment of their ideas; Jupiter is only given imaginatively, while the real person is given perceptually. Despite the differences in the phenomenological presentness, they all are presented as an actual experience. Even if I subtract both Jupiter and the real person from the experience of cognizing them, I saw my consciousness is still directed towards something. Husserl pointed out that this intentionality of consciousness is the essential framework behind every cognition.
He then proceeded to argue regarding this primary datum of consciousness. He noted in all types of experience, imaginative or perceptual, shared within them a structure of unity of intentional acts, which consists of objects and part-objects. For an example, the idea of “a knife on the table” consists of the knife as the object and the table as the part-object. He observed that the table relates to the knife in a particular necessary relation. The idea cannot be cognized as thus, if there’s no such relation. It can be the table is on the knife, the knife at the side of the table et cetera, but not necessarily “a knife on the table”. But it is being presented as thus, and as thus necessarily.
Now, he argued that both imaginative and perceptual objects shared the same properties. The imaginative object being presented possessed a certain robustness to the image, and being constituted as thus. We can imagine the cube in the imagination to be anticipated of its hidden surfaces, just like the cube if given into our hands. We can also imagine a non-sense image such as a flying pink elephant, and it would be given as we imagined it to be, possessing specific relations of perhaps a wing, the color pink and the elephant. In fever-dreams, the clarity of the image might be questionable but not the robustness of it.
He also argued that both imaginative and perceptual objects to not be immanent contents of the consciousness. He did this to avoid being trapped in subjective idealism which stipulated that everything that exists, exists only in mind. He proposed that within the same act of consciousness we can appreciate the hidden profile of the imaginary cube. If the object is located within the mind, we would appreciate that the act-quality of consciousness also changed as the cube is turned. But this do not happen, the cube can rotate 360 degrees without a change to our mode of thinking. This is a radical contribution by Husserl by insisting that both imaginative and perceptual objects to be existing outside of the mind, in order to guarantee the objectivity of the World. If the necessary intentionality of consciousness is directed to extramental objects, the objects and the context it appeared must be necessary too.
The internal unity between objects and part-objects also contributes to a phenomenogical observation of how within the same experience, there’s different grades of fulfilment. The surface of the cube given to me now is being fulfilled of its intention par excellence, while the hidden part-objects while relating to the objects necessarily, only being anticipated imaginatively. As we shift our attention to the hidden profile, we can appreciate the retainment of the unity of experience while the hidden profile are becoming more fulfilled, and the previous given surface are receding into becoming the imaginative part-object.
The consciousness on the retainment of the unit of the object showed that the differences between the given and the hidden surface of the cube is due to its different act-quality, and not its matter. The given surface is as thus due to its perceptual act-quality, and the hidden surface imaginative act-quality. And both are given simultaneously but diffes on the level of fulfilment. When we turned the corner and greeted by a strange lady, we are given a perception of a lady before we realized that it is only a wax-figure. The imaginative lady and the perceptual wax-figure can only possible to be simultaneous in nature if they both shared the same matter/subtratum. Differences are only lies at the mode/quality of the acts.
But how can the imaginative, sort of glides into the perceptual? How can the same object to possess different levels of fulfilment?
***
Investigation VI
Husserl observed that there’s a continuum between the imaginative and the perceptual, and to this he added a third mode of experience; the signitive/symbolic. The word “this!” Possessed a meaning despite not possessing any intuitive (sensuous) foundation. And when “this” is followed by pointing to a paper, then I observe the prior meaning of “this” from mere bracketing or intending my consciousness to something, is being fulfilled into a fully fledged perception. There’s an expansion of meaning of the same word, without the need to verbalize the intended object. A person who yet to visit Madrid, after recognizing that Madrid is the capital of Spain is able to grasp the meaning of Madrid without the need to visit it personally. When he visited the town in propria persona, this indirect reference held in suspense is merely being fulfilled.
There’s thus a continuum between the symbolic which directs the consciousness or providing it with a context, the imaginative which the presentation is given adequately but held in suspense and the perceptual which is the fulfilment of the suspended idea.
Throughout the thought experiment, despite existing in three different modes, the object of the thought remains as a unity. It is intended the same in all three modes, but only being fulfilled in different grades.
Husserl believed that the a priori proof for the unity of the idea can be shown through how when a familiar melody bgins, it stirs definite intentions within which has been anticipated prior, and merely being fulfilled in the melody’s gradual unfolding. Even when a melody is unfamiliar, it opened into a horizon of anticipation which does not extend haphazardly but following certain rules and range of intentions. Thus Husserl mentioned that,
“What was pictorially suggested (anticipated, the addition is mine) from one side, becomes confirmed in full perception from another; what was merely adumbrated or given indirectly and subsidiarily as background prior receives a portrait-sketch from another…”.
Intentional experience thus anticipates the thing’s hidden/ungiven part-moments which belonged in a unity within the same intuition. The imaginative is part of the unity of the intention in which the same object is given but not through identification but through likeness. And this likeness is not created haphazardly, but an act of ideality relating the unfulfilled intention with the unity of the idea. Just like how the crescent-moon is related as a lack of the full-moon, instead of other shapes, such as rectangular etc.
But how the imaginative can be objectively being fulfiled into the perceptual? Husserl believed that the proof of the fulfilment is through self-evidence, a witnessing of the intentional essence of the thing. That is the same object in my hand can be conceived by being given in propria persona, or merely being given imaginatively or perhaps occupying existence at mere symbolic level. They all related towards each other as internal unity of the idea. If the intention is being fulfilled by a corresponding intuition, then it is given.
In a way, Husserl appealed to the correspondence criterion of truth. He defines truth as an ideal relationship that achieves a unity of coincidence among the epistemic essences of the coinciding acts. It is simply as, if the symbolic, imaginative coincides with the perceptual then Husserl believed that it satisfies the criterion of truth.
Now his idea of truth might be anticlimactic, and he was accused of being a radical empiricist, but what he is saying is basically there’s a primacy of existential knowledge. As the images of consciousness does not inhabit the minds, just like Descartes imagined, then there’s no issue of interpretation or mismatch between the idea of the mind and the physical object. All objects, Husserl insisted, exists outside of mind but at different level of fulfilment.
When I grasped a cord-like structure in a box and thought it is a snake while it is just a rope, there would be no doubt on what kind of image popped into my mind, as in my consciousness there’s only my meaning-intention directed towards a class of objects presented symbolically, being feared imaginatively and then discovered in perceptual that it is just a rope. The guarantee of existence of objects is due to the content of consciousness are not fixed mental images that opens to the possibility of error and thus subjectivism, it is that the content of consciousness is consisted of the necessary mechanism of meaning-intending intentions directed to external objects that is being unfolded in time through synthetic a priori method of fulfilment.
The rope being conceived as a snake does not occur haphazardly, it is impossible to include a nose into one of possibilities of the object because it simply does not being included within the range of things under the one symbolic intention. And the range of things under an intention is governed by categorial intuitions that reflects only the pure relation between objects. It is because the bulbous nature of the nose being categorially intuited as different from the cord-like nature of the rope that excludes it and other implausible objects from the range of the symbolic. This does not mean that categorial intuition contains the idea of the bulbous and the cord. It is simply by appealing to the pure relation between things, as much as the intuition of 2 + 2 = 4 does not include of 2 apples combined with 2 apples resulting into 4 apples. The apples are being conceived as thus due to the categorical intution of mathematical truths that are totally devoid of any sensuous content. The categorial intuition does not contain any sensuous material as it provides the foundation of it, as much as the pure concept of Plurality does not partake within the packet of balls, yet provide the foundation of the balls into being conceived as plural a priori.
Thus, we have arrived to the conclusion of the Logical Investigation, a Herculean labor in philosophy. The primacy of experiential intuition, even in his early radical position, hinted Husserl’s eventual turn towards idealism, almost immediately in his next work, Ideas I.
Let us move on to it.
S.M.Y Kayseri
12th of July 2024
But it is to actually silence my silent thoughts. For every thoughts wished to be born, and to smell the scent of consciousness, instead of reveling in the dark. Its gratification belongs to its expression, and not its celebration by the many. It is suffice that the only ones who read upon my meanderings would be myself and the Symparanekromenoi; my League of Shadows.
***
The thematic reading of Husserl has arrived to its Fifth Part with this post. I planned to read majority of Husserl’s works as a project for myself this year, as I have scoured the works of al-Attas, Kant, Schopenhauer and many others in the previous years. I included here the links to the previous parts:
1. Part I: Husserl’s Phenomenology by Dan Zahavi: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?stor...
2. Part II: Prolegomena to Pure Logic (1900): https://m.facebook.com/story.php?stor...
3. Part III: Logical Investigations, Volume I (1901): https://m.facebook.com/story.php?stor...
4. Part IV: Logical Investigations, Volume II (1901), Investigations III and IV: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?stor...
***
I believed, when Husserl first started on the Prolegomena to the Logical Investigations, he never knew that his initial intention to disprove psychologism would end up as a full-blown rewriting on epistemology. His subject is much more complex, almost to the point of being unreadable at certain passages, and it is understandable, for he undertook a step forward than Kant.
Kant’s mission was to debunk Hume’s empiricism which he feared would throw the entire mission of knowledge into subjectivism. His magnum opus is essentially that: it’s a critique. His entire thesis is to propose the idea of transcendental idealism in response against Hume. His exposition on the transcendental form of sensibility and understanding built from his direct predecessors of Wolff, and more ambivalently, Leibniz.
But Husserl is essentially paving an entire new pathway. While Kant’s critique addressed the possible object of cognition, Husserl investigated the essential framework of consciousness that allows the very possibility of cognition. Kant’s project inevitably ended up with a negative statement; that Humean empiricism can be thrashed, but at the cost of the necessary implausibility regarding the knowing of the noumenon. Husserl, on the other hand, as we will see below contributed a positive thesis on the structure of consciousness and its role in guaranteeing the objectivity of the World.
***
At the beginning of the Investigation V, Husserl noted that even as he imagining about the idea of the deity Jupiter and a real person in front of him to have no essential difference in their givenness to us. They only differ at the level of fulfilment of their ideas; Jupiter is only given imaginatively, while the real person is given perceptually. Despite the differences in the phenomenological presentness, they all are presented as an actual experience. Even if I subtract both Jupiter and the real person from the experience of cognizing them, I saw my consciousness is still directed towards something. Husserl pointed out that this intentionality of consciousness is the essential framework behind every cognition.
He then proceeded to argue regarding this primary datum of consciousness. He noted in all types of experience, imaginative or perceptual, shared within them a structure of unity of intentional acts, which consists of objects and part-objects. For an example, the idea of “a knife on the table” consists of the knife as the object and the table as the part-object. He observed that the table relates to the knife in a particular necessary relation. The idea cannot be cognized as thus, if there’s no such relation. It can be the table is on the knife, the knife at the side of the table et cetera, but not necessarily “a knife on the table”. But it is being presented as thus, and as thus necessarily.
Now, he argued that both imaginative and perceptual objects shared the same properties. The imaginative object being presented possessed a certain robustness to the image, and being constituted as thus. We can imagine the cube in the imagination to be anticipated of its hidden surfaces, just like the cube if given into our hands. We can also imagine a non-sense image such as a flying pink elephant, and it would be given as we imagined it to be, possessing specific relations of perhaps a wing, the color pink and the elephant. In fever-dreams, the clarity of the image might be questionable but not the robustness of it.
He also argued that both imaginative and perceptual objects to not be immanent contents of the consciousness. He did this to avoid being trapped in subjective idealism which stipulated that everything that exists, exists only in mind. He proposed that within the same act of consciousness we can appreciate the hidden profile of the imaginary cube. If the object is located within the mind, we would appreciate that the act-quality of consciousness also changed as the cube is turned. But this do not happen, the cube can rotate 360 degrees without a change to our mode of thinking. This is a radical contribution by Husserl by insisting that both imaginative and perceptual objects to be existing outside of the mind, in order to guarantee the objectivity of the World. If the necessary intentionality of consciousness is directed to extramental objects, the objects and the context it appeared must be necessary too.
The internal unity between objects and part-objects also contributes to a phenomenogical observation of how within the same experience, there’s different grades of fulfilment. The surface of the cube given to me now is being fulfilled of its intention par excellence, while the hidden part-objects while relating to the objects necessarily, only being anticipated imaginatively. As we shift our attention to the hidden profile, we can appreciate the retainment of the unity of experience while the hidden profile are becoming more fulfilled, and the previous given surface are receding into becoming the imaginative part-object.
The consciousness on the retainment of the unit of the object showed that the differences between the given and the hidden surface of the cube is due to its different act-quality, and not its matter. The given surface is as thus due to its perceptual act-quality, and the hidden surface imaginative act-quality. And both are given simultaneously but diffes on the level of fulfilment. When we turned the corner and greeted by a strange lady, we are given a perception of a lady before we realized that it is only a wax-figure. The imaginative lady and the perceptual wax-figure can only possible to be simultaneous in nature if they both shared the same matter/subtratum. Differences are only lies at the mode/quality of the acts.
But how can the imaginative, sort of glides into the perceptual? How can the same object to possess different levels of fulfilment?
***
Investigation VI
Husserl observed that there’s a continuum between the imaginative and the perceptual, and to this he added a third mode of experience; the signitive/symbolic. The word “this!” Possessed a meaning despite not possessing any intuitive (sensuous) foundation. And when “this” is followed by pointing to a paper, then I observe the prior meaning of “this” from mere bracketing or intending my consciousness to something, is being fulfilled into a fully fledged perception. There’s an expansion of meaning of the same word, without the need to verbalize the intended object. A person who yet to visit Madrid, after recognizing that Madrid is the capital of Spain is able to grasp the meaning of Madrid without the need to visit it personally. When he visited the town in propria persona, this indirect reference held in suspense is merely being fulfilled.
There’s thus a continuum between the symbolic which directs the consciousness or providing it with a context, the imaginative which the presentation is given adequately but held in suspense and the perceptual which is the fulfilment of the suspended idea.
Throughout the thought experiment, despite existing in three different modes, the object of the thought remains as a unity. It is intended the same in all three modes, but only being fulfilled in different grades.
Husserl believed that the a priori proof for the unity of the idea can be shown through how when a familiar melody bgins, it stirs definite intentions within which has been anticipated prior, and merely being fulfilled in the melody’s gradual unfolding. Even when a melody is unfamiliar, it opened into a horizon of anticipation which does not extend haphazardly but following certain rules and range of intentions. Thus Husserl mentioned that,
“What was pictorially suggested (anticipated, the addition is mine) from one side, becomes confirmed in full perception from another; what was merely adumbrated or given indirectly and subsidiarily as background prior receives a portrait-sketch from another…”.
Intentional experience thus anticipates the thing’s hidden/ungiven part-moments which belonged in a unity within the same intuition. The imaginative is part of the unity of the intention in which the same object is given but not through identification but through likeness. And this likeness is not created haphazardly, but an act of ideality relating the unfulfilled intention with the unity of the idea. Just like how the crescent-moon is related as a lack of the full-moon, instead of other shapes, such as rectangular etc.
But how the imaginative can be objectively being fulfiled into the perceptual? Husserl believed that the proof of the fulfilment is through self-evidence, a witnessing of the intentional essence of the thing. That is the same object in my hand can be conceived by being given in propria persona, or merely being given imaginatively or perhaps occupying existence at mere symbolic level. They all related towards each other as internal unity of the idea. If the intention is being fulfilled by a corresponding intuition, then it is given.
In a way, Husserl appealed to the correspondence criterion of truth. He defines truth as an ideal relationship that achieves a unity of coincidence among the epistemic essences of the coinciding acts. It is simply as, if the symbolic, imaginative coincides with the perceptual then Husserl believed that it satisfies the criterion of truth.
Now his idea of truth might be anticlimactic, and he was accused of being a radical empiricist, but what he is saying is basically there’s a primacy of existential knowledge. As the images of consciousness does not inhabit the minds, just like Descartes imagined, then there’s no issue of interpretation or mismatch between the idea of the mind and the physical object. All objects, Husserl insisted, exists outside of mind but at different level of fulfilment.
When I grasped a cord-like structure in a box and thought it is a snake while it is just a rope, there would be no doubt on what kind of image popped into my mind, as in my consciousness there’s only my meaning-intention directed towards a class of objects presented symbolically, being feared imaginatively and then discovered in perceptual that it is just a rope. The guarantee of existence of objects is due to the content of consciousness are not fixed mental images that opens to the possibility of error and thus subjectivism, it is that the content of consciousness is consisted of the necessary mechanism of meaning-intending intentions directed to external objects that is being unfolded in time through synthetic a priori method of fulfilment.
The rope being conceived as a snake does not occur haphazardly, it is impossible to include a nose into one of possibilities of the object because it simply does not being included within the range of things under the one symbolic intention. And the range of things under an intention is governed by categorial intuitions that reflects only the pure relation between objects. It is because the bulbous nature of the nose being categorially intuited as different from the cord-like nature of the rope that excludes it and other implausible objects from the range of the symbolic. This does not mean that categorial intuition contains the idea of the bulbous and the cord. It is simply by appealing to the pure relation between things, as much as the intuition of 2 + 2 = 4 does not include of 2 apples combined with 2 apples resulting into 4 apples. The apples are being conceived as thus due to the categorical intution of mathematical truths that are totally devoid of any sensuous content. The categorial intuition does not contain any sensuous material as it provides the foundation of it, as much as the pure concept of Plurality does not partake within the packet of balls, yet provide the foundation of the balls into being conceived as plural a priori.
Thus, we have arrived to the conclusion of the Logical Investigation, a Herculean labor in philosophy. The primacy of experiential intuition, even in his early radical position, hinted Husserl’s eventual turn towards idealism, almost immediately in his next work, Ideas I.
Let us move on to it.
S.M.Y Kayseri
12th of July 2024
January 23, 2024
finally!!!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews