Page 541 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

founded the phenomenological movement in phil- osophy; and his last works exercised a formative influence on the subsequent history of existentialism.
1. Life and Thought
Husserl was born in what is now Prostejov, in the Czech Republic. He studied a variety of subjects at the Universities of Leipzig (1876-78), Berlin (1878- 81), and Vienna (1881-83), eventually specializing in mathematics. In 1883 he was awarded a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Vienna. After 1884, however, he fell increasingly under the influence of Franz Brentano, who persuaded him to devote his life to philosophy. After studying with Carl Stumpf in Halle, Husserl completed his Habilitation in phil- osophy in 1887. Between 1901 and 1916 he taught philosophy at Gfittingen University, and from 1916 until his retirement in 1929 he was Professor of Phil- osophy at Freiburg. He died in Freiburg in 1938.
There are three major phases in Husserl's intel- lectual development. First, between 1887 and 1907 he worked largely within the Brentanian discipline of descriptive psychology, on problems within logic, the philosophy of language, and the foundations of math- ematics. Second, from 1907 until roughly 1930 he developed a phenomenological version of tran- scendental idealism. According to this theory, the most fundamental explanatory principles in phil- osophy are to be isolated by examining the essential structures in terms of which meaningful, intentional experience is possible. Finally, in the last years of his life Husserl came to believe that an appeal to individual, self-contained consciousness is incapable of explaining how objectivity is possible. He therefore began to develop a phenomenology that took as primi- tive, not the solipsistic consciousness of an individual considered in isolation, but rather the shared form of life, the Lebenswelt, that comprises the tacit back- ground and foundation of all science, rationality, objectivity, and action.
2. Logic and Language
Husserl's first major, influential work was the Logical Investigations of 1900-01. It contains, amongst other things, a detailed and powerful refutation of psy- chologism in logic; a formal investigation of whole- part theory; a formulation of the principles of cat- egorial grammar, based on an analysis of semantic categories; and a phenomenological theory of linguis- tic meaning. Within linguistics, Husserl's early work on syntactic categories formed the basis of subsequent developments by Lesniewski, Ajdukiewicz, Bar-Hillel, and others.
Husserl's early theory of meaning shares a number of elements with that of his contemporary, Gottlob Frege. Both, for example, distinguish between an expression, its sense or meaning, and its objective cor- relate or reference; and both construe the sense of an
expression as an abstract entity. They differ, however, in three fundamental respects.
(a) For Husserl the object or reference of an expression is a merely 'intentional' object, rather than a genuine component of the real world. So, where Frege would deny that an expression can refer to a nonexistent object like Sherlock Holmes, Husserl maintains that the expression 'Sherlock Holmes' has both a con- tent or sense, and an objective correlate or ref- erence to which it is directed, namely, the intentional object Sherlock Holmes.
(b) While Frege construes the sense of an expression as an abstract object, that is, as an individual or particular entity, Husserl claims that a sense is a universal or 'species,' the instances of which are particular mental acts of meaning-intention.
(c) Frege's influential context principle, that 'a word only means something in the context of a sentence' is not one to which Husserl could subscribe. On the contrary, his analysis of intentionality—of the object-directedness of conscious mental acts and states—yields the conclusion that nominal acts are prior to, and independent of, prepositional ones. Cor- respondingly, he maintains, isolated subsen- tential expressions such as singular terms express an intelligible meaning, and possess an objective correlate prior to, and independently of, their occurrence in any sentential context.
3. The Phenomenology of Meaning
Phenomenology, in Husserl's hands, is the study of the essen-tial structures of pure consciousness, as these are revealed directly within experience itself. Pure con- sciousness, in other words, comprises whatever is immediately given in experience, precisely as it is given. Within phenomenology, therefore, neither explicit reference to, nor tacit reliance on, any objects, facts, properties, or laws that in any way transcend consciousness is to be permitted; and the so-called transcendental phenomenological reduction is a device designed precisely to sever all naturalistic con- nections between pure consciousness, on the one hand, and the extramental world on the other. A phenomenological investigation of pure consciousness reveals, Husserl claims, that the single most important and problematic characteristic of experience is that it is meaningful. Accordingly, in the works of his middle period, and especially in Ideas (1913), Husserl's philo- sophical goal is the explanation of the origin and nature of meaning, of how anything can in principle come to be significant, possess a content, or refer to something beyond itself.
All meaning, he believes, can be traced back to the mind's synthetic activity; for it is only as a result of such activity that experience can be object-directed,
Husserl, Edmund
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