爱豆传媒

This book aims to dispel a certain misunderstanding about Logical Investigations (1900/1901), the early major work of German philosopher Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. In short, this misunderstanding is the view that Husserl was merely a “second-rate Frege.”
 
“Frege” refers to Gottlob Frege, a German mathematician, logician, and philosopher nearly contemporary with Husserl. Frege is known for laying the foundations of modern mathematical logic and presenting a rigorous theory for analyzing how language works. He is regarded as one of the founders of analytic philosophy, which is one of the dominant traditions in contemporary philosophy. What is now called “Fregean semantics” has retained its fundamental ideas in modern theories of linguistics and the philosophy of language.
 
A renowned scholar of Frege, Michael Dummett, compared the theories of Frege and Husserl and offered the following assessment: “We cannot derive from [Husserl’s] work any serious rival to Frege’s theory.” This position seems to be an established consensus in analytic philosophy. It is this view that this book calls a “misunderstanding.”
 
That said, this misunderstanding is not easily dismissed; rather, it is supported by a penetrating perspective on how languages and thoughts work. Indeed, Husserl does not present a semantic theory that rivals Fregean semantics. In this aspect, Husserl is nothing more than a “second-rate Frege.” To respond properly to this critique, it is necessary to acknowledge this fact while identifying what is truly innovative in Husserl’s philosophy. However, traditional Husserl scholars have not only failed to adequately respond to Dummett’s critique but, in many cases, have not even properly understood it.
 
This book responds to Dummett’s critique by drawing on insights from a field that has recently been clearly distinguished from semantics: metasemantics. Metasemantics seeks to explain the facts described by semantics in terms of more fundamental facts. In philosophy, the term “intentionality” is often used to refer to the cognitive functions of language and thought. In these terms, semantics describes intentionality, whereas metasemantics identifies the facts in which intentionality is grounded. By interpreting Logical Investigations in light of the distinction between semantics and metasemantics, it becomes clear that Husserl not only distinguished metasemantic inquiry from semantic inquiry, but also explicitly engaged in the former and developed a concrete theoretical framework. This is where the true philosophical significance of Logical Investigations lies in the history of philosophy, and in this respect, Husserl is not a “second-rate Frege.”
 

(Written by KUZUYA Jun, Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2025)