Husserl and Frege: Trajectories of Comparative Studies

Abstract

Comparative studies of Frege's and Husserl's legacy do not lose intensity during seven decades. The aim of the article is the comprehension of preconditions and the main directions of those issues. The author considers Frege's Review of Dr. E. Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic (1894) as the historical precedent which is a prerequisite for a comparative research of Husserl and Frege. The diversions between Frege and Husserl regarding the concept of number are significant for setting up boundaries of logicism. Nevertheless, the author argues the nourishing source of the comparative analysis of Frege's and Husserl's doctrines is not their contradictions but their resemblance. The scholars worked out the problem of clean thinking (reinen Denken), which derives its categories from its development. They both tried to overcome the subjectivism and psychologism, free the logical categories from the psychological content. They both understood thought as the objective, universal entity that is independent of carriers. The scholars had common ontological and epistemological stances. The fact of their mutual criticism arouses keen interest in this context. This criticism invoked the resonance in such directions of the comparative studies as (1) discussion of the problem of Frege's and Husserl's psychologism and anti-psychologism; (2) assessment of the influence of Frege's ideas on the origin of phenomenology; (3) the search for the roots of the separation between phenomenology and analytic philosophy. The author considers the understanding of "psychologism" and its subsequent reception by Willard, Hanna, Dammett, Kusch, Mohanty, and Centrone. After that the author outlines the points of comparing in the early logical and mathematical works by Frege and Husserl (the concepts of number, multitude, equivalency; singular terms; proper names; indexicals; substitutivity). Further, the author concerns the discussion by Follesdal, Mohanty, Rosado Haddock, Ierna, Zuh, and Kunne regarding the question of whether Frege's criticism was crucial to form phenomenology or not. In conclusion, the author considers the searches of the origins of the "gap" between analytic and phenomenological philosophy. The latter was detected by Dammett, Parsons, Cobb-Stevens, Willard, Ruin, Ladov, and others in the logical and semantic pioneering of Frege and Husserl.