Transcendental phenomenology and intentional psychology. the problem of transcendental psychologism

pp. 232-266

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

Abstract

Let us make clear to ourselves the sense of transcendental problems. Every science has its province, and aims at the theory of its province. In that theory it has its result. But scientific reason is what makes those results; and experiential reason is what makes the province. This is true in the case of formal logic, with its higher-level relation to something existent and perhaps to any possible world; this is true in the case of its theory, as having a higher-level universality relating likewise to all particular theories. Something existent, theory, reason — these do not come together accidently; and they must not be presupposed as a trio assembled accidentally, even though "with unconditional universality and necessity". This very necessity and universality must be examined, as pertaining to the logically thinking subject, to me as a subject who can submit himself only to a logic that he himself thinks through, and has thought through, with insight. — To me, because at first here no reference is made to any other reason than mine, nor to any other experience or theory than mine, nor to any other existent than an existent that I legitimate by experience, and that, as something somehow meant or supposed, must be in my field of consciousness if I am to produce a theory with it, in my theoretic acting, in my evidence.