The Analytic Turn in Early Twentieth-century Philosophy

3- Bolzano and Husserl: Semantic, Conceptual and Phenomenological Analysis

As the papers in Part One confirm, analytic philosophy as we understand it today has its origins in the work of Frege, Russell and Moore around the turn of the twentieth century, and as the papers in Part Two show, that work was developed in various ways as analytic philosophy blossomed in the period that followed. As we have also seen, however, the founders of analytic philosophy were not operating in a vacuum. They were both reacting against earlier forms of philosophy and yet at the same time subtly transforming certain key conceptions that they inherited, such as the decompositional conception of analysis associated with Kant, in particular. A proper understanding of the nature and development of analytic philosophy thus requires situating it in the broader historical context. One important philosopher active in the period between Kant and early analytic philosophy is Bolzano, who was born in the year that theCritique of Pure Reason was published and died in the year that Frege was born. Although Bolzano had no direct influence on the founders of analytic philosophy, many of his ideas anticipated ideas that we now treat as characteristic of analytic philosophy, and he offered a powerful critique of Kant’s philosophy, as Sandra Lapointe shows in ‘Bolzano’s Semantics and his Critique of the Decompositional Conception of Analysis’.

Lapointe begins by elucidating the decompositional conception of analysis that can be found in Kant’s discussion of analyticity, and identifies what Bolzano took to be responsible for the inadequacies of this conception, namely, the deficient understanding of the distinction between the properties of objects and the constituents of concepts. Bolzano’s critique of Kant is grounded in his own semantic theory, and Lapointe goes on to explain some of the main elements of this theory, focusing, in particular, on his conceptions of ‘Proposition’ (‘Satz an sich ’) and ‘Idea’ (‘Vorstellung an sich ’) and his account of analyticity. In the case of the former, there are instructive comparisons to be made with Frege’s conception of sense (Sinn ), and Lapointe clarifies the process of analysis that Bolzano saw as required to exhibit the Proposition expressed by an ordinary sentence as used on a given occasion. Such a process of analysis Bolzano called ‘Auslegung ’, involving the paraphrasing of the ordinary sentence into a sentence of a semi-formal canonical language that expresses its meaning completely and unambiguously. Here, too, we see a similarity to Russell’s idea of analysis (after 1905) as involving the transformation of ordinary sentences into sentences of a logically perfect language which mirror the reality they represent. In the case of analyticity, Lapointe shows how Bolzano’s account made use of the method of substitution, which was later to play a role in the work of both Alfred Tarski (1901-83) and Quine - although neither was directly influenced by Bolzano.

While Bolzano may have had no direct influence on the development of analytic philosophy, however, he did have an important influence on Husserl, as Lapointe notes in the final section of her paper. Bolzano’s influence on Husserl is also mentioned by Dermot Moran in ‘Edmund Husserl’s Methodology of Concept Clarification’, Bolzano being seen as having inspired Husserl to investigate our knowledge of ideal objects such as numbers and universals (e.g. Redness). Traditional empiricism went wrong, according to Husserl, by failing to provide an adequate account of such knowledge, and one of the purposes of his new method of phenomenological analysis was to offer a better account. Moran notes Husserl’s apparent agreement with the empiricist in claiming that “no concept can be thought without a foundation in a concrete intuition” (quoted on p. [5] below), and explains Husserl’s construal of knowledge as the ‘fulfilment of intuition’, but emphasizes that Husserl’s concern was to expand the range of what counts as ‘fulfilment’. (As suggested above, it is instructive to compare Husserl’s views here with Russell’s early assumption that we can be ‘acquainted’ with universals and the role that the principle of acquaintance plays in Russell’s philosophy.)

In his paper, Moran offers an account of the development of Husserl’s conception of phenomenological analysis from 1891, when hisPhilosophy of Arithmetic was published, to 1907, when Husserl started to see his philosophy as a new kind of transcendental philosophy. From the very beginning, Moran argues, Husserl was concerned with identifying certain subjective conditions of objective cognition, which he came to call ‘phenomenological’ conditions, and distinguishing these from merely ‘psychological’ conditions. Moran illustrates this in section 5 of his paper, in discussing Husserl’s early account of our grasp of the concept of number. Husserl distinguishes the psychic acts that he regards as essential in our coming to grasp the concept of number, such as the intellectual synthesis he calls ‘collective combination’, from the psychic acts that may be involved on particular occasions but are not essential, such as our ability to order things in space and time.

After thePhilosophy of Arithmetic , Husserl’s attention shifted to the foundations of logic and epistemology, and Moran explains the development of Husserl’s method in the two volumes of hisLogical Investigations (1900-1). Husserl described this work himself as “the result of ten-year long efforts for a clarification of the pure idea of logic by a return to the bestowing of sense or the performance of cognition which occurs in the nexus of lived experiences of logical thinking” (quoted on p. [19] below). Such a search for clarification can be found illustrated in Husserl’s discussion of the sense in which we talk of mathematical objects ‘existing’. Moran ends by addressing the question of the relationship between phenomenological analysis and linguistic analysis. According to Husserl, the latter is at best only a preliminary to the former, the aim of which is to uncover the a priori forms of consciousness - the necessary conditions of our apprehension of objects.

Husserl’s method of phenomenological analysis is also discussed in the final two papers of Part Three, Leila Haaparanta comparing it with ancient Greek geometrical analysis and Amie Thomasson comparing it with the form of conceptual analysis found in the later ordinary language tradition of analytic philosophy. In ‘The Method of Analysis and the Idea of Pure Philosophy in Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology’, Haaparanta begins by offering a characterization of ‘pure’ philosophy, in terms of the exclusion of argumentation based on empirical beliefs, and then clarifies the process of ‘phenomenological reduction’, understood as the movement from the ‘natural attitude’ to the ‘philosophical attitude’ whereby the various assumptions and commitments of everyday life and science are ‘bracketed’ in order to find the underlying logical forms and essential concepts. In section 4 she explains Husserl’s distinction between three elements of cognition - noesis (the cognitive act), noema (the cognized as cognized) and the object itself (towards which the cognitive act is directed), and outlines the debate that there has been over how these are related. She then highlights what she sees as the key issue here, which concerns the relationship between the objects of the natural attitude and the objects (noemata) of the philosophical attitude. Must the latter not be the same as the former if phenomenological analysis is to be correct, but if this is so, then what does analysis achieve? What we have here, of course, is yet a further version of the paradox of analysis.

Haaparanta does not confront this paradox directly, but instead elucidates the process of phenomenological analysis by comparing it with problem-solving analysis in ancient Greek geometry (though not as understood by Husserl himself). Just as the geometer starts by taking the figure to be constructed as ‘given’, in order to ‘analyze’ it to identify the parts and their relationships, and the relevant principles, by means of which to show exactlyhow it can be constructed (in accord with the terms of the problem), so too, Haaparanta suggests, the phenomenologist takes the objects of the natural attitude as given and seeks to understand their formation. Like geometrical analysis, she writes, “phenomenological analysis is stepping backwards, researching into how experience is structured. The phenomenological description is the phase of construction. Phenomenologists construct in the peculiar sense that they articulate or make the constitution of the world of the natural attitude explicit.” (p. [14] below) She concludes by noting the analogy that can also be seen with Russell’s theory of descriptions, where expressions, too, are transformed in yielding a deeper understanding of what is (supposedly) meant.

In the final paper, ‘Conceptual Analysis in Phenomenology and Ordinary Language Philosophy’, Amie Thomasson argues that both phenomenology and the ordinary language tradition of analytic philosophy can be seen as offering the same response to the crisis that reached its head at the end of the nineteenth century regarding the proper methods and role of philosophy. In particular, she suggests, they were both responding to psychologism in taking philosophy to be concerned with the analysis of meanings or concepts. In the first two sections she counters some misconceptions about the differences between analytic philosophy and phenomenology, and in the final two sections clarifies the fundamental method that she sees them as sharing.

In the first section she argues against the view that while phenomenology is concerned with analyzing meanings of our mental states, analytic philosophy is concerned with analyzing meanings in language. Husserl, too, stressed that we must begin with linguistic discussions while keeping in mind that grammatical form can be misleading. On the other side, within ordinary language philosophy, the aim is not insight into words for their own sake but understanding of the concepts they express. Indeed, as Thomasson notes, Austin himself at one point suggested that his method might be called ‘linguistic phenomenology’. In the second section, she rebuts the charge that Husserl’s phenomenology invoked a baroque ontology of essences and a mysterious epistemology of ‘intuiting’ them. What Husserl meant by ‘inspection of essences’ (‘Wesensschau ’), she writes, was “nothing more than beginning from a presentation of an object of a certain kind and imaginatively varying the presentation in various ways to yield general truths about what changes can and cannot be tolerated if we are to be presented with an object of that kind” (p. [11] below). It is thus comparable to the method of considering imagined cases employed so extensively by analytic philosophers. And talk of ‘essences’, she goes on, is no more than the linguistic hypostatization of general truths about concepts. As she sums it up, “Husserl’s essences seem more properly understood as pleonastic than as Platonistic” (p. [15] below).

In the final two sections, Thomasson suggests how Husserl’s method of ‘eidetic variation’ can be seen as a form of conceptual analysis, via the transformations effected by hypostatization, which at the same time yields ‘ontological’ results. But ‘ontology’ must here be interpreted as similar to the ‘descriptive metaphysics’ that Strawson advocated, Thomasson writes, which “differs from conceptual analysis only in ‘scope and generality’, by its concern with interconnections among our most general and basic concepts” (pp. [19-20] below). We have seen how one strand in analytic philosophy culminates in connective analysis; if Thomasson is right, then a similar strand can be discerned in phenomenology. Certainly, the similarities in methodology between certain strands in analytic philosophy and phenomenology are striking, and elucidation of one can be used to throw light on the other.