Initial questions of transcendental logic

problems concerning fundamental concepts

pp. 176-183

in: Edmund Husserl, Formal and transcendental logic, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1969

Abstract

Despite misinterpretations and disguisements of the analytic sphere, analytic logic has long been with us; with respect to those of its disciplines that are "formal-mathematical" in the narrower sense, it has been with us even in a highly developed form. Consequently there can have been no lack of evidence in the forming of logical categories and differentiated forms; indeed, such evidence has at all times been particularly esteemed. But, in spite of that, it is anything but exemplary. By using this word, we have already intimated that such evidence — that evidence of every sort — should be reflectively considered, reshaped, analyzed, purified, and improved; and that afterwards it can be, and ought to be, taken as an exemplary pattern, a norm./The formations with which logic is concerned and their universal forms are given at first in a straightforward evidence; and this comes first necessarily. But now a thematizing reflection on this evidence is demanded: a reflection, that is, on the formative activity, which has heretofore been carried on straightforwardly and naively, without becoming a theme.