Husserl: Correspondence

Clemens Baeumker -- Hedwig Conrad-Martius -- Alois Dempf -- Nicolai Hartmann -- Martin Heidegger -- Eugen Victor Herrigel -- Edmund Husserl -- Hermann Graf Keyserling -- Oswald Külpe -- Arthur Liebert -- Erich Przywara SJ -- Heinrich Rickert -- Eduard Spranger.

Through a commentary of the letter sent by Husserl to the 8th International Congress of Philosophy in 1934, the essay intends to clarify the concept of “responsibility” as a “universal form” thanks to which the rational human being orients his acts according to a consciously ethical direction. By focusing on the dynamics that characterize the relationship between Logos and Ethos, is then pointed up Husserl’s aim to build a gnoseology that can’t be solved in an abstract intellectualism as it embodies (...) always a constructive criticism of the present and its aberrations. The appeal contained in the letter of 1934 for an epoché of every historical tradition becomes therefore the premise for an overcoming of past conceptual forms in order to reach the “implicit” concealed into every historical event and whose grasp and interpretation is possible only to the eidetic view of the phenomenologist. (shrink)

Husserl’s letter to Levy-Bruhl dating from 1935 ends with an indication of phenomenological transrationalism that should both reach beyond and fulfill the intentions of old rationalism. It can be understood either as rationalism to the second power or as the surpassing of rationality in the direction of a certain kind of rationality that bears an insight into its own limits of reaching the life-world.

In letters that Husserl and Frege exchanged during late 1906 and early 1907, when it is thought that Frege abandoned his attempts to solve Russell's paradox, Husserl expressed his views about the "paradox". Studied here are three deep-rooted differences between their approaches to pure logic present beneath the surface in these letters. These differences concern Husserl's ideas about avoiding paradoxical consequences by shunning three potentially para-dox producing practices. Specifically, he saw the need for: 1) correctly drawing the line between meaning (...) analyses and logical analyses; 2) an epistemology of pure logic; 3) a subtler under-standing of the semantics of statements than Frege proposed. This study is part of a project to lend insight into the questions that Russell's paradox raises for logic and epistemology once signaled by Gödel, an admirer of Husserl's work. (shrink)

t54 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:1 JANUARY 1996 the theme of play, the comparisons with Japanese and Chinese thought .would benefit from reflection on the psychological implications of Nietzsche's sense of"the innocence of becoming," emphasized, for example, by Joan Stambaugh in The Other Nietzsche. Finally, as I develop in my book From Nietzsche to Wittgenstein: The Problem of Truth and Nihilism in theModern WorM, Nietzsche's own understanding of his philosophical task was inseparable from the historical problem of nihilism (...) and its overcoming in the modern world. To portray him primarily as the great psychologist he surely was is to perhaps unduly minimize not only his philosophical self-understanding, but his philosophical significance for our own engagement with the problem of nihilism in the twentieth century. Yet in spite of such limitations, this book remains a masterpiece of its kind. GLEN T. MARTIN Radford University Edmund Husserl. Briefwechsel. H usserliana Dokumente II 1/1-1 o. Karl and Elisabeth Schuhmann, editors. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer, 1993. Cloth, $15oo.oo. Why should anyone interested in a philosopher's philosophy need to read that philoso- pher's correspondence? Is not curiosity about someone's personal liti: and character irrelevant to grasping the value and meaning of that person's thought? It is, of course, a basic philosophical issue to determine to what extent and for what reason the study of a.. (shrink)

This edition of Husserl's correspondence comprises 10 volumes. Its philosophical core is contained in the first four volumes, which correspond to the four phases of Husserl's philosophical career: as follower of Brentano, as mentor of the realist phenomenologists in Munich (the founders of the 'phenomenological movement'), and as professor, successively, in Göttingen and Freiburg. The remaining five volumes pertain to HusserI's correspondence with philosophers and other scholars outside the inner circle of the phenomenological movement, with institutions and editors, and with (...) family members and friends. Volume 10 comprises a masterly introduction to the edition by the editors, Karl and Elisabeth Schuhmann, together with chronological tables and seven separate indexes enabling the user to trace references in the letters to Husserl's own publications, manuscripts and lectures, as well as to persons, institutions and places. (shrink)

First published in English in1966, _The True and The Evident_ is a translation of Franz Brentano’s posthumous _Wahrheit und Evidenz_, edited by Oscsar Kraus. The book includes Brentano’s influential lecture "On the Concept of Truth", read before the Vienna Philosophical Society, a variety of essays, drawn from the immense wealth of Brentano’s unpublished material, and letters written by him to Marty, Kraus Hillebrand, and Husserl. Brentano rejects the familiar versions of the "correspondence theory of truth" and proposes to define the (...) true in terms of the evident. In criticising the metaphysical assumptions presupposed by the correspondence theory, he sets forth a conception of language and reality that has subsequently become known as "reism". (shrink)

Dear Colleague: Your letter shook me so profoundly that I was unable to answer it as soon as I should have. I am continuously concerned with it in my thoughts. Judge for yourself whether I have not inflicted more pain on myself than on you, and whether I may not ethically regard this guilt towards you and blame towards myself as stemming from the best conscience, something I have had to accept, and still must accept, as my fate. Clarifing the (...) matter requires that I lay out a part of my life history. I had quickly realized that the project for Parts II and III of my Ideas was inadequate, and in an effort (beginning in the autumn of l9l2) to improve them and to shape in a more concrete and differentiated fashion the horizon of the problems they disclosed, I got involved in a new, quite far-ranging investigations. (These included the phenomenology of the person and personalities of a higher order, culture, the human environment in general; the transcendental phenomenology of “empathy” and the theory of transcendental intersubjectivity, the “transcendental aesthetic” as the phenomenology of the world purely as the world of experience, time and individuation, the phenomenology of association as the theory of the constitutive achievements of passivity, the phenomenology of the logos, the phenomenological problematic of “metaphysics,” etc.) These investigations stretched on all through the workfilled Freiburg years, and the manuscripts grew to an almost unmanageable extent. As the manuscripts grew so too did the ever greater the apprehension about whether, in my old age, I would be able to bring to completion what had been entrusted to me. This impassioned work led to repeated setbacks and repeated states of depression. In the end what I was left with was an allpervasive basic mood of depression, a dangerous collapse of confidence in myself. It was in this period that Heidegger began to mature -— for a number of.. (shrink)