The logical investigations

paving the way to a transcendental logic

John Drummond

pp. 31-40

in: Dan Zahavi, Frederik Stjernfelt (eds), One hundred years of phenomenology, Deventer, Kluwer, 2002

Abstract

This epigraph from Formal and Transcendental Logic echoes Husserl's complaint in the foreword to the second part of volume two of the Logical Investigations about the "often heard, but to my mind grotesque reproach, that I may have rejected psychologism sharply in the first volume of my work, but that I fell back into psychologism in the second."² The epigraph, however, also suggests that the Investigations do not go far enough in overcoming psychologism. Only a transcendental phenomenology, it is said, suffices to overcome psychologistic prejudices. On this view, then, the "phenomenological" investigations found in the second volume of the Investigations have merely "paved the way" to the transcendental critique of all cognition found in Husserl's mature phenomenology. This paper poses two questions: (1) Why, given the rejection of psychologism, is there need for a phenomenology? and (2) Why is there a need for a transcendental phenomenology?

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund