Logical Investigations

Introduction

Husserl published the work in two volumes in 1900 and 1901, while teaching in Halle. The first volume, Prolegomena to Pure Logic, argues that psychologism – the view that logical laws are laws of human thinking – ends in scepticism, because logical validity cannot depend on how minds happen to work. The second contains six investigations, among them studies of expression and meaning, of parts and wholes, of intentional experiences and of knowledge, with the distinction between an empty intention and its fulfilment in intuition. Husserl revised the work in 1913 and 1921. It drew the first generation of phenomenologists to Göttingen and Munich, and the young Heidegger read it again and again as a student.

Connections

Builds on

• Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint1874 · Franz Brentano
• The Foundations of Arithmetic1884 · Gottlob Frege

Criticizes

• A System of Logic1843 · John Stuart Mill

Taken up in

• Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values1913 · Max Scheler
• Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology1913 · Edmund Husserl
• Being and Time1927 · Martin Heidegger

Criticized in

• Speech and Phenomena1967 · Jacques Derrida

More works by Edmund Husserl

• 1913Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology
• 1931Cartesian Meditations
• 1936The Crisis of European Sciences