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Pure Grammar A turning point in the development of logic What is the idea of pure grammar to which the title of Husserl’s fourth In­ vestigation refers? What is the idea of a grammar of pure logic to which §14 of that Investigation refers? What is the logic of this grammar? What is the grammar of this logic? And what is the philosophical significance of his idea of pure logical grammar? I shall begin to try to answer these questions by way of the answer Husserl himself gives from a historical point of view to the last of them, explaining what part he sees this answer contributing to philosophy. I shall focus upon the development of logic. The Development of Logic is the title of a large book by William and Mar­ tha Kneale in which one will search in vain through its 750 pages for a men­ tion of Husserl, in spite of the fact that, like W. R. Boyce Gibson, the translator of Husserl’s Ideas, and Emmanuel Levinas, the translator of part of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, William Kneale attended some of the lectures Husserl gave at Freiburg in the Summer Semester of 1928. That was a year before Hus­ serl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic was published and a year before Hus­ serl travelled to Paris to give the Paris Lectures on which the Cartesian Meditations were to be based. In April of 1928 Husserl gave a lecture in Amsterdam where he met the intuitionist mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer. In the preceding FIVE PURE GRAMMAR | 95 month Brouwer had travelled from Amsterdam to Vienna to give the lecture on “Mathematics, Science, and Language.” This lecture was heard by Wittgen­ stein and was the occasion of a switching of his attention from questions ar­ chitectural back to questions philosophical and logico­mathematical, now in a style in some respects sympathetic with Brouwer’s but antipathetic to that of Bertrand Russell and Frank Ramsey, who referred to Brouwer as “the Bolshe­ vik menace.”1 Under that description Ramsey included too Hermann Weyl. Husserl had been chairman of the board of examiners for Weyl’s doctoral dis­ sertation at Göttingen in February 1908. I do not know whether after his visit to Vienna in February 1928 Brouwer was back in Amsterdam to hear Husserl deliver two lectures there the following month. Nor have I come across any explicit reference by Husserl to Wittgenstein. However, Wittgenstein refers to Husserl, and Husserl had read some Russell at least by 1936. How, from the context of this chronicle of encounters, near­misses, and philosophical peripatetics in the early part of the twentieth century, does Husserl see the relation between his own ideas about logic and about gram­ mar and philosophical movements in earlier centuries? Plato, he says, set the ideal of a radical scientific responsibility in which his dialectical logic would be the science of all sciences and self­responsibly justify itself.2 So, we may say parenthetically, Plato at the beginning of the history of philosophy is a paradigm of the moral responsibility—“the duty of genius,” we might say, borrowing the subtitle of a book on Wittgenstein— which Husserl himself brings to his own philosophizing from the beginning, a responsibility which he seems to deem non­independent of logic when he writes “As one who judges, I remain true to myself (Ich bleibe als Urteilender mir treu), I remain self­consistent (mir ‘konsequent’), just as long as I stick to my judgments. . . .”3 It is as though Husserl is no more concerned with the logic of the consistency and truth of judgments than he is with the veracity of the judger and that he considers these to be ultimately inseparable. The Platonic ideal of a science that gives unity to all science is embraced by Husserl in a course given in 1924 and 1925, when one of the members of his class was Rudolf Carnap. And if Plato responds to skepticism and soph­ istry by pointing a way to the ideal of an authentic science of science which will “found, assure and justify definitively every kind of activity of human reason . . . ,” Husserl adds that it will achieve this “by means of theoretical reason and its predicative judgements.”4 To this extent at least Husserl is a Platonist even as late as the mid­1920s. But long before then, by 1910 and probably 1908, he is no longer a Platonist if Platonism is taken to posit Ideas as...

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