ABSTRACT
Husserl’s Logical Investigations has been one of the most influential works of philosophy of the twentieth century, though more for its announcement of phenomenology than for its logical discoveries, which though original and important were largely ignored, and subsequently discovered independ ently of Husserl’s own efforts. Logical Investigations is a huge, unmanage able book in two volumes. Husserl rarely signifies in advance where he is going, and rarely considers the views of other philosophers. Husserl himself was among the first to acknowledge its defects, speaking of its “internal unevenness and fragmentary nature” (ILI, p. 17; Fink, p. 110). It was the product of ten years of research from 1890 onwards, but Husserl singles out the Halle lectures of 1896 on logic as the proximate source of the book. Its roots, however, lie much deeper in studies on logic, signification, and meaning, which Husserl was carrying out from the time of the publication of Philosophy o f Arithmetic. Furthermore, Husserl was still revising the work when the manuscript, according to the tradition, was wrested from his hands by Carl Stumpf for publication. It remains, then, a work-in-progress, a ‘patchwork’ of different themes. It would be wrong to conclude, however, that because the Logical Investigations is, as David Bell says, “badly written, poorly organised, and not always obviously consistent”, that it is without philosophical merit.1 The work is a tour de force of philosophical thought in process, full of conceptual clarifications of lasting significance, and, even more importantly, providing a living demonstration of the practice of phenomenology as conceptual clarification. In this chapter, I shall try to provide a basic sense of the book’s aims and achievements.
