{"id":1961,"date":"2022-07-13T15:07:41","date_gmt":"2022-07-13T15:07:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2022\/07\/13\/a-hitherto-unknown-portrait-of-edmund-husserl\/"},"modified":"2022-07-13T15:07:41","modified_gmt":"2022-07-13T15:07:41","slug":"a-hitherto-unknown-portrait-of-edmund-husserl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2022\/07\/13\/a-hitherto-unknown-portrait-of-edmund-husserl\/","title":{"rendered":"A Hitherto Unknown Portrait of Edmund Husserl and his Relation to Leonard Nelson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Husserl<\/a> Sketch found in the notebooks of Leonard Nelson. This page<\/a> offers some insights into the Husserl-Nelson relationship if you want to call it that. Husserl appears in a churlish light as a Fachphilosoph<\/em> looking down on a lowly dozent and perceived amateur. Husserl apparently ignored or dismissed  Nelson's The Impossibility of the Theory of Knowledge <\/a><\/span>despite its relevance to Husserl's project of founding philosophy als strenge Wissenschaft<\/em>, as strict science.<\/span><\/p>\n

Roman Ingarden, Husserl's distinguished student, has  the following to say about Nelson (a German despite his very English surname) in his On the Motives which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism<\/a>: <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

It so happened that in the very years that Husserl jumped into the arena of epistemology, Leonard Nelson directed a sharp attack against the theory of knowledge. (footnote #1o:  Cf. Leonard Nelson, Ueber das sogenannte Erkenntnisproblem. Die Unmoeglichkeit <\/em><\/span>der Erkenntnistheorie, vol. III, Abhandlungen der Friesschen Schule<\/em>, also in the Acts <\/em><\/span>of the IV International Congress of Philosophy, 1911<\/em>. Husserl's ideas must have been <\/span>completely crystallized in this period. Nelson was a Dozent in Goettingen from the year <\/span>1909.<\/span>) <\/span><\/p>\n

We know that Nelson made an attempt to show the impossibility of epistemology by pointing out that inevitably in it one cannot avoid committing <\/span>the error of petitio principii<\/em>. Husserl, as far as I know, never spoke nor wrote about this opinion expressed by Nelson and must have seen this danger clearly for himself, but he certainly knew about Nelson's book. Whatever the relations were between the two thinkers, it is a fact that in the period when I heard Husserl's lectures (with interruptions, from 1912 to 1917) he very often drew attention in his lectures and seminars to the "nonsense" (Widersinn<\/em>) in the attempt to arrive at an epistemological solution, e.g. concerning the cognitive value of outer perception, by appealing to the existence of qualities in objects given in cognition of the kind which is investigated when, e.g. — as was usual in the psycho-physiology of the second half of the 19th century — we appeal to "physical stimuli" which act upon what is called our senses in order to show that sense perception falsely informs us about "secondary" qualities of material objects. It is also a fact that the application of the phenomenological reduction, which Husserl introduced with another aim in mind in Ideas I, eo ipso <\/em>removes the danger of petitio principii<\/em> in the investigations into the experiential mode of cognition of the objects of the real world. After having carried out this reduction we find ourselves, nevertheless, ipso facto<\/em> in the area of pure transcendental consciousness inside which we are to carry out all epistemological investigations; but, in addition, it has to be agreed that every being (real or ideal or purely intentional) is to be deduced from the essence of the operations (acts) of pure consciousness. It seems to be that from the point of view of a valid epistemological methodology a certain kind of priority is to be demanded for pure consciousness, and that this is possible is also shown by the theory of immanent perception and the results of the analysis of primary constitutive consciousness constituting, for example, time. But, along with this, this "priority" of pure consciousness begins to assume a metaphysical character in the form even of a thesis of the absolute existence of pure consciousness, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, of an existential dependence of all other being, and, above all, of the real world, on pure consciousness. The danger of petitio principii<\/em> in epistemology is removed by the phenomenological reduction but it leads to an account of the existence of the world which (in spite of all differences, from, for example, Berkeley's position, which Husserl himself constantly and emphatically stressed) comes alarmingly close to the Marburgian Neo-Kanti[ani]sm, of which Husserl was often accused on the grounds of similarities between his Ideas<\/em> and [Paul] Natorp's Allgemeine Psychologie<\/em> of 1912. (pp. 11-13)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

 Sketch found in the notebooks of Leonard Nelson. This page offers some insights into the Husserl-Nelson relationship if you want to call it that. Husserl appears in a churlish light as a Fachphilosoph looking down on a lowly dozent and perceived amateur. Husserl apparently ignored or dismissed  Nelson's The Impossibility of the Theory of Knowledge … Continue reading “A Hitherto Unknown Portrait of Edmund Husserl and his Relation to Leonard Nelson”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,353,526],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-husserl","category-knowledge","category-nelson-leonard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}