In search of the origins of some of the most fundamental problems that have beset philosophers in English-speaking countries in the past century, Claire Ortiz Hill maintains that philosophers are treating symptoms of ills whose causes lie buried in history. Substantial linguistic hurdles have blocked access to Gottlob Frege's thought and even to Bertrand Russell's work to remedy the problems he found in it. Misleading translations of key concepts like intention, content, presentation, idea, meaning, concept, etc., severed analytic philosophy from its roots. Hill argues that once linguistic and historical barriers are removed, Edmund Husserl's critical study of Frege's logic in his 1891 Philosophy of Arithmetic provides important insights into issues in philosophy now. She supports her conclusions with analyses of Frege's, Husserl's, and Russell's works, including Principia Mathematica, and with linguistic analyses of the principal concepts of analytic philosophy. She re-establishes links that existed between English and Continental thought to show Husserl's expertise as a philosopher of mathematics and logic who had been Weierstrass's assistant and had long maintained ties with Cantor, Hilbert, and Zermelo.

This volume is a window on a period of rich and illuminating philosophical activity that has been rendered generally inaccessible by the supposed "revolution" attributed to "Analytic Philosophy" so-called. Careful exposition and critique is given to every serious alternative account of number and number relations available at the time.

I Edmund Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen is, by any standard and also by nearly common consent, a great philosophical work. Within the phenom enological movement, it is generally recognised that the breakthrough to pure phenomenology - not merely to eidetic phenomenology, but also to transcendental phenomenology - was first made in these investiga tions. But in the context of philosophy of logic and also of theory of know ledge in general, these investigations took decisive steps forward. Amongst their major achievements generally recognised are of course: the final death-blow to psychologism as a theory of logic in the Prolegomena, a new conception of analyticity which vastly improves upon Kant's, a theory of meaning which is many-sided in scope and widely ramified in its appli cations, a conception of pure logical grammar that eventually became epoch-making, a powerful restatement of the conception of truth in terms of 'evidence' and a theory of knowledge in terms of the dynamic movement from empty intention to graduated fulfillment. There are many other detailed arguments, counter-arguments, conceptual distinctions and phenomenolo gical descriptions which deserve the utmost attention, examination and assimilation on the part of any serious investigator. With the publication of J. N. Findlay's English translation of the Untersuchungen, it is expected that this work will find its proper place in the curriculum of the graduate programs in philosophy in the English speaking world.

The principal differences between the contemporary philosophic traditions which have come to be known loosely as analytic philosophy and phenomenology are all related to the central issue of the interplay between predication and perception. Frege's critique of psychologism has led to the conviction within the analytic tradition that philosophy may best defend rationality from relativism by detaching logic and semantics from all dependence on subjective intuitions. On this interpretation, logical analysis must account for the relationship of sense to reference without having recourse to a description of how we identify particulars through their perceived features. Husserl' s emphasis on the priority and objective import of perception, and on the continuity between predicative articulations and perceptual discriminations, has yielded the conviction within the phenomenological tradition that logical analysis should always be comple mented by description of pre-predicative intuitions. These methodological differences are related to broader differences in the philosophic projects of analysis and phenomenology. The two traditions have adopted markedly divergent positions in reaction to the critique of ancient and medieval philosophy initiated by Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes at the beginning of the modern era. The analytic approach generally endorses the modern preference for calculative rationality and remains suspicious of pre-modern categories, such as formal causality and eidetic intuition. Its goal is to give an account of human intelligence that is compatible with the modern interpretation of nature as an ensemble of quantifiable entities and relations.

Most areas of philosopher Edmund Husserl’s thought have been explored, but his views on logic, mathematics, and semantics have been largely ignored. These essays offer an alternative to discussions of the philosophy of contemporary mathematics. The book covers areas of disagreement between Husserl and Gottlob Frege, the father of analytical philosophy, and explores new perspectives seen in their work.

In From Kant to Husserl, Charles Parsons examines a wide range of historical opinion on philosophical questions from mathematics to phenomenology. Amplifying his early ideas on Kant’s philosophy of arithmetic, the author then turns to reflections on Frege, Brentano, and Husserl.