Abstract

Tragesser intends to show that Husserl in his phenomenological investigation of the foundations of logic and mathematics undercuts the basis on which the problem of realism and antirealism in epistemology and the philosophy of logic is traditionally conceived. Husserl does this, Tragesser contends, by attempting "to purge logical thinking of [the] assumption [of the law of the excluded middle] while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of psychologism". Central to this investigation is Husserl's disclosure of the noema, the intentional correlate of an act of consciousness, as the thought-component of acts of thinking. Thus, phenomenology, on Tragesser's account, is the descriptive theory of "the domain of all possible thoughts and thus also all possible entities which can be thought".