Husserl's philosophy of language

Lloyd J. Carr

pp. 54-76

in: Mohanty, Edmund Husserl's theory of meaning, Berlin, Springer, 1976

Abstract

We have said that Husserl's Platonism, in his theory of meaning, concerns the intended meaning or the content of the meaning-intending act, whereas his positivism concerns the fulfilled meaning or the content of the meaning-fulfilling act. It is the intended meaning of which the language of entities holds good; besides, it is of the intended meaning that we can predicate that identity, objectivity and universality, in short, that ideality which Platonists ascribe to the socalled abstract entities. On the other hand, the idea of meaning-fulfilment seeks to accommodate the phenomenological element in the positivist's emphasis on empirical verification. Thus Husserl may be said to have brought about a synthesis of Platonism and Anti-Platonism, the two opposed camps who have fought the battle over the problem of "meaning.'

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund