An unbridled search for logic: four studies of Husserl's logical investigations (1900-01)

The early Husserl wants to know what logic is, or what we should call ‘logic.’ He poses the question in a way that knowingly encompasses both what the 19th century (after Kant but before Frege) and the 20th century (since Frege) call ‘logic.’ But that he asks the question, and with such scope, has yet to be widely recognized. In particular, Husserl scholars still lack an overview of how Husserl’s early, explicitly logical inquiries, driven more by this single question than any worry about doctrinal consistency, does at least two things at once: probe what will later be called ‘pure phenomenology’ or ‘transcendental logic,’ and delimit logic as a positive yet mathematical discipline. With the aim of providing the neglected overview of this project, this dissertation takes the measure of Husserl’s two-volume Logical Investigations (1900-01) in four studies. Chapter I argues that the first volume, the Prolegomena to Pure Logic (1900), intends at once to resolve a 19th-century conflict and to establish logic’s possibility as its own discipline, all by means of demonstrating the confusion of psychologism (the view that empirical psychology could set the terms for logic as a discipline). Chapter II then contends that most of the Prolegomena’s first chapter falls outside this intention, departing from the book’s Bolzano-inspired argumentative framework yet thereby anticipating Husserl’s later ‘transcendental logic.’ Chapter III presents Frege and Husserl as two images of indecision as to how it falls to logic to know truth’s laws. Chapter IV concludes by expounding Husserl’s conception of logic as noetics, the self-clarification of knowing, thus completing the picture of Husserl’s indecision, while also laying groundwork to track the development of his thinking after the Logical Investigations