From Kant to Husserl: Selected Essays

257 Pages·2012·0.709 MB·English

by  Charles Parsons

FROM KAN T TO H USSER L

FROM KAN T TO H USSER L
SELECTED ESSAYS
Charles Parsons
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland
2012
Copyright © 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Parsons, Charles, 1933–
From Kant to Husserl : selected essays / Charles Parsons.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 674- 04853- 9 (alk. paper)
1. Philosophy, German— 18th century. 2. Philosophy, German— 19th century.
3. Philosophy, German— 20th century. 4. Philosophy, Modern. 5. Kant, Immanuel,
1724– 1804. 6. Frege, Gottlob, 1848– 1925. I. Title.
B2741.P37 2012
193—dc23 2011030877
For Jotham and Sylvia

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Part I: Kant
Note to Part I 3
1 The Transcendental Aesthetic 5
2 Arithmetic and the Categories 42
3 Remarks on Pure Natural Science 69
4 Two Studies in the Reception of
Kant’s Philosophy of Arithmetic 80
Postscript to Part I 100
Part II: Frege and Phenomenology
5 Some Remarks on Frege’s Conception of Extension 117
Postscript to Essay 5 131
6 Frege’s Correspondence 138
Postscript to Essay 6 158
7 Brentano on Judgment and Truth 161
8 Husserl and the Linguistic Turn 190
Bibliography 217
Copyright Ac know ledg ments 231
Index 233

PREFACE
The present volume is the fi rst of two volumes collecting most of my
essays on other phi los o phers, excluding those already reprinted some
years ago in Mathematics in Philosophy. The rough division of the vol-
umes is between essays on pre-t wentieth- century and on later authors.
Thus the projected second volume will be titled Philosophy of Mathe-
matics in the Twentieth Century. The essays in the present volume are
on the whole less focused on philosophy of mathematics than those in
the projected second volume.
Frege and Brentano are reasonably thought of as nineteenth-c entury
fi gures, although they were intellectually active into the twentieth cen-
tury, and some of their late work is discussed in these essays. Husserl is
certainly a twentieth-c entury fi gure, and the work discussed in Essay 8
was all at least published in that century and mostly written then. But
it seemed more appropriate to group that essay with those on Frege
and Brentano, the more so since it is not at all about philosophy of
mathematics.
Of the Kantian essays, Essays 1, 2, and 4 grew out of my earlier
work on Kant’s philosophy of arithmetic. However, Essay 1 is a general
commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic and does not attempt to
present an interpretation of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics. It is
well known that much of the latter is to be found in other, rather
scattered, writings of Kant. Essay 1 is the only place where I have at-
tempted to say something substantial about the distinction between
appearances and things in themselves, but it limits its focus to the
Aesthetic and so does not purport to be a full treatment of that theme
even in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is an issue that I have always
found diffi cult, and I am sympathetic to the view expressed by Allen
Wood that it is not possible to resolve the main disputes on the basis of
ix