Conference | Paper

Willard on Husserl's Early (before 1900) Negative Critique of Mathematical and Logical Formalization

Burt C. Hopkins

Thursday 6th December 2018

09:30 - 10:30

Willard’s separation of Husserl’s arguments for the philosophical need to provide an epistemological foundation for symbolic cognition from his psychological account of that foundation in his early work, which extracts those arguments from the psychologism that they are embedded in, is explicated. His apt characterization of them in terms of Husserl’s “negative critique of the ‘extentionalist’ logic of that day (1891-1900) and argument for their “profound relevance . . . to the logical studies of our time” is presented and largely endorsed. It is so, because of its relevance to both contemporary Husserl studies and to the enduring philosophical problem of the theory of symbolic computation.