Husserl and the "Foundations of geometry"

Keiichi Noé

pp. 193-210

in: Philip Blosser, Eiichi Shimomissé, Lester Embree, Hiroshi Kojima (eds), Japanese and Western phenomenology, Berlin, Springer, 1993

Abstract

In the late 1890's, there was a famous controvery between Hilbert and Frege concerning the "foundations of geometry," especially the status and meaning of non-Euclidean geometry. Husserl was a colleague of Hibert in Göttigen and an opponent of Frege and left a short manuscript that included an excerpt of their correspondence and critical comments on it. Husserl clearly understood the point of their crucial differences and sympathized with Hilbert's axiomatic method. But he could not rest content with Hilbert's formalistic position later and moved to the transcendental grounding of the sciences.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund