The idealizing presuppositions of logic and the constitutive criticism of them

pp. 184-201

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

Abstract

Having made clear to ourselves the necessity of our first series of critical investigations, let us now make clear their insufficiency. We now require a criticism of analytic logic that can make us conscious of a number of idealizing presuppositions / with which logic operates as if they were truisms, not on the basis of a method that has become thematic, but again on the basis of a method used naïvely — presuppositions that we ourselves had consequently taken over without noticing them. This new criticism is a continuation of the one we practised at the first level, to clear up the division into three strata; and it therefore presupposes that criticism's investigations.