Husserl's formalism

Mohanty

pp. 93-105

in: Thomas M. Seebohm, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Mohanty (eds), Phenomenology and the formal sciences, Berlin, Springer, 1991

Abstract

It has been one of the strange and unexamined features of contemporary philosophy that philosophical as well as technical concern with the formal sciences — formal logic and mathematics, formal syntax and semantics — has been taken to be an ally of a positivistic, formalistic and (narrowly) analytic philosophical perspective. I believe that upon closer questioning, this alleged alliance breaks down, and the prima facie neutrality of the concern with formalism leaves room for a great diversity of philosophical standpoints — from a Platonic to a Kantian, to name two familiar contrasting positions. It is also a philosophically unexamined point of view, which requires that an understanding of the nature of the formal sciences must itself be formalistic, that you truely understand the nature of a formal discipline when you embed it in a meta — discipline of the same nature. There is certainly a sense of "understanding" in which this is the case. But there is a sense of "understanding", a sense that is of central importance to philosophy — in which one can ask questions about the formal sciences which do not permit any non-trivially formalised answer.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund

Plato