REVISTING HUSSERL’S ACCOUNT OF LANGUAGE IN LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS
REVISTING HUSSERL’S ACCOUNT OF LANGUAGE IN LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS

Summary/Abstract: The main aim of this paper is to revisit and reassess the account of language at the origins of Husserl’s phenomenology specifically focusing on Logical Investigations. I would like to argue that there is an ambivalence in Husserl’s discussion of language in Logical Investigations: on the one hand, Husserl is concerned with language as one of the most important symbolic systems and a requisite for scientific knowledge, and he emphasizes the role of linguistic discussions as the philosophically indispensable preparations for constructing pure logic; on the other hand, he applies the idea of the fundamental distinction between the realm of ideal and real being to his views of logic, science and language, which finally causes him to interpret the relation between logic, science and language as the inessential one. The paper begins with discussing Husserl’s view of symbolic methods and sign systems in Prolegomena. The second section is focused on the idea of the necessity of linguistic investigations for pure logic presented in the Introduction to the second volume of Logical Investigations. In the final section I make an analysis of the 4th Logical investigation with the special emphasis put on the idea of pure logical grammar.

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