The Cambridge Companion to Husserl

527 Pages·2005·7.021 MB·English

by  Barry Smith, David Woodruff Smith

Each volume of this series of companions to major philoso
phers contains specially commissioned essays by an interna
tional team of scholars, together with a substantial bibliog
raphy, and will serve as a reference work for students and
non-specialists. One aim of the series is to dispel the intimi
dation such readers often feel when faced with the work of
a difficult and challenging thinker.
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) is a seminal figure in the
evolution of modem philosophy. His genius derived from his
judicious integration of traditional ideas from such thinkers
as Aristotle, Descartes, and Hume with a more sophisticated
understanding of the mind and conscious experience influ
enced by Brentano. He has proven to be a powerful influence
on many aspects of twentieth-century thought: phenomenol
ogy, existentialism, hermeneutics, post-structuralism, and
deconstruction, among others.
The essays in this volume explore the full range of Hus
serl's work and reveal just how systematic his philosophy is.
There are treatments of his most important contributions to
phenomenology, the theory of intentionality, epistemology,
ontology, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of
mathematics. An underlying theme of the volume is a resis
tance to the idea, current in much intellectual history, of a
radical break between modem and postmodern philosophy,
with Husserl as the last of the great Cartesians. Husserl is
seen in this volume as a philosopher constantly revising his
system. The so-called rift between analytic and continental
philosophy emerges as an artificial construct.
New readers and non-specialists will find this the most
convenient and accessible guide to Husserl currently avail
able. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspec
tus of recent developments in the interpretation of Husserl's
thought.
THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO
HUSSERL
OTHER VOLUMES IN THE SERIES OF CAMBRIDGE
COMPANONS:
AQUINAS Edited by NORMAN KRETZMANN and
ELEANORE STUMP (pu.bJished)
ARISTOTLE Edited by JONATHAN BARNES (published)
BACON Edited by MARKKU PELTONEN
DESCARTES Edited by JOHN COTTINGHAM (published)
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY Edited by A. A. LONG
FICHTE Edited by GUENTER ZOELLER
FOUCAULT Edited by GARY GUTTING (published)
FREGE Edited by TOM RICKETTS
FREUD Edited by JEROME NEU (published)
HABERMAS Edited by STEPHEN WHITE (published)
HEGEL Edited by FREDERICK BEISER (published)
HOBBES Edited by TOM SORELL
HUME Edited by DAVID FATE NORTON (published)
WILLIAM JAMES Edited by RUTH ANNA PUTNAM
KANT Edited by PAUL GUYER (published)
LEIBNIZ Edited by NICHOLAS JOLLEY (published)
LOCKE Edited by VERE CHAPPELL (published)
MARX Edited by TERRELL CARVER (published)
MILL Edited by JOHN SKORUPSKI
NIETZSCHE Edited by BERND MAGNUS and
KATHLEEN HIGGINS
PEIRCE Edited by CHRISTOPHER HOOKWAY
PLATO Edited by RICHARD KRAUT (published)
PLOTINUS Edited by LLOYD P. GERSON
SARTRE Edited by CHRISTINA HOWELLS (published)
SPINOZA Edited by DON GARRETT
WITTGENSTEIN Edited by HANS SLUGA and
DAVID STERN
The Cambridge Companion to
HUSSERL
Edited by
Barry Smith
SUNY, Buffalo
and
David Woodruff Smith
University of California, Irvine
..... ~.""CAMBRIDGE
;:: UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNNERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
Published in the United States ofA merica by Cambridge University Press, New York
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©Cambridge University Press 1995
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions ofrelevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1995
Reprinted 1996 (twice), 1998, 1999
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
ISBN-10 0-521-43023-2 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-43616-8 paperback
Transferred to digital printing 2005
CONTENTS
Contributors vii
Introduction I
BARRY SMITH and DAVID WOODRUFF SMITH
1 The development of Husserl's thought 45
J. N. MOHANTY
2 The phenomenological dimension
JAAKKO HINTIKKA
3 Meaning and language 106
PETER SIMONS
4 Knowledge
DALLAS WILLARD
s
Perception 168
KEVIN MULLIGAN
6 Transcendental idealism 239
HERMAN PHILIPSE
7 Mind and body
DAVID WOODRUFF SMITH
8 Common sense 394
BARRY SMITH
v
vi Contents
9 Mathematics 438
RICHARD TIESZEN
IO Part-whole 463
KIT FINE
Bibliography 487
Index
509
CONTRIBUTORS
KIT FINE is Flint Professor of Philosophy at the University of Califor
nia, Los Angeles. He is the author of Worlds, Times, and Selves
(with A. N. Prior, Duckworth, I977), Reasoning with Arbitrary Ob
jects (Blackwell, I985), and numerous articles, including "Essence
and Modality" (Philosophical Perspectives, I994). His work focusses
on metaphysics, logic, and philosophy of language.
J AAKKO HINTIKKA is Professor of Philosophy at Boston University,
the University of Helsinki, and the Academy of Finland. He is the
author of many books and articles, including Knowledge and Belief
(Cornell, I962), Models for Modalities (D. Reidel, I969), The Inten
tions of Intentionality (D. Reidel, I975), Investigating Wittgenstein
(with Merrill Hintikka, Blackwell, I986), and work in the develop
ment of game-theoretic semantics. His work ranges over logic, phi
losophy of language, linguistics, epistemology, phenomenology, and
history of philosophy.
JITENDRA NATH MOHANTY is Professor of Philosophy at Temple
University. He is the author of Husserl and Frege (Indiana Univer
sity Press, I982), Transcendental Philosophy: An Analytic Account
(Blackwell, I989), and Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought (Ox
ford University Press, I992), as well as other books and numerous
articles on Husserl and phenomenology.
KEVIN MULLIGAN is Professor of Analytic Philosophy at the Uni
versity of Geneva. He is the editor of Speech Act and Sachverhalt:
Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology (Martinus
Nijhoff, 1987) and the author of various articles on ontology, philoso
phy of language, and phenomenology.
HERMAN PHILIP SE is Professor of Epistemology and Metaphysics at
Leyden University in The Netherlands. He is the author of two
books (in Dutch), one on Husserl's philosophy of logic and one on
vii
viii Contributors
Descartes' moral theory, and numerous articles on phenomenology,
epistemology, metaphysics, and history of philosophy.
PETER SIMONS is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Salzburg. As of I995 he will be Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Leeds. He is the author of Parts: A Study in Ontology
(Oxford University Press, 1987) and Philosophy and Logic in Cen
tral Europe from Balzano to Tarski (Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1992), as well as many articles on ontology, logic, philosophy of
language, philosophy of mathematics, and the history of philoso
phy and logic.
BARRY SMITH is Professor of Philosophy and Member of the Center
for Cognitive Science at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
He the editor of Parts and Moments: Studies in Logic and Formal
Ontology (Philosophia Verlag, 1982) and the author of Austrian Phi
losophy (Open Court, l 994) and numerous articles on Husserl, formal
ontology, and related themes. He is the editor of The Monist.
DAVID WOODRUFF SMITH is Professor of Philosophy at the Univerc
sity of California, Irvine. He is the author of Husserl and Inten
tionality (with Ronald Mcintyre, D. Reidel, 1982) and The Circle of
Acquaintance: Perception, Consciousness, and Empathy (Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1989), as well as a variety of articles on phe
nomenology, philosophy of mind and language, and ontology.
RICHARD TIESZEN is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Califor
nia State University, San Jose. He is the author of Mathematical
Intuition: Phenomenology and Mathematical Knowledge (Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1989), "The Philosophy of Arithmetic: Frege
and Husserl" (l 994), and other works on philosophy of mathematics,
logic, and phenomenology.
DALLAS WILLARD is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Southern California. He is the author of Logic and the Ontology of
Knowledge (Ohio University Press, 1984) and various articles on
ontology and cognition. He has translated the most important pa
pers written by Husserl during the 1890s, published as Volume V of
Husserl's "Collected Works" (in English) under the title Early Writ
ings in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics (Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1994).
BARRY SMITH AND DAVID WOODRUFF SMITH
Introduction
I. HUSSERL'S PLACE IN THE HISTORY
OF PHILOSOPHY
Edmund Husserl was born in 1859 in Moravia, then a part of the
Habsburg Empire, now a part of the Czech Republic. He studied
mathematics in Leipzig and Berlin, where he came into contact with
the great German mathematician Karl Weierstrass. Encouraged by
his friend and fellow Moravian T. G. Masaryk (also for a time in
Leipzig and later first President of the erstwhile Republic of Czecho
slovakia), Husserl attended lectures in philosophy given by Franz
Brentano in Vienna. He devoted his life thereafter to what, from
around 1908, he came to see as his "mission" - to transform philoso
phy into a rigorous science.
Husserl's philosophy, by the usual account, evolved through
three stages. First, he overthrew a purportedly psychologistic posi
tion in the foundations of arithmetic, striving instead to establish
anti-psychologistic, objective foundations of logic and mathemat
ics. Second, he moved from a conception of philosophy as rooted in
Brentanian descriptive psychology to the development of a new
discipline of "phenomenology" and a metaphysical position dubbed
"transcendental idealism". And third, he transformed this phenome
nology, which initially amounted to a form of methodological solip
sism, into a phenomenology of intersubjectivity and ultimately (es
pecially in his Crisis of 1936) into an ontology of the life-world,
embracing the social worlds of culture and history.
This story of three revolutions can provide, at best, a preliminary
orientation. Husserl was constantly expanding and revising his philo
sophical system, integrating views in phenomenology, ontology, epis-
l