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In the Prolegomena to his Logische Untersuchungen (LU) Edmund Husserl praised the first two volumes of Bernard Bolzano's Wissenschaftslehre (WL) as "far surpassing everything else world literature has to offer as systematic exposition of logic". Eleven years later the key is a bit lower: These volumes, he now says, occupy "the highest rank in the logical world literature of the 19^th century"¹. To the best of my knowledge, the most extensive and most thorough discussion of a single contention in Bolzano's philosophy of logic that can be found in any of Husserl's books and articles published during his lifetime is contained in the last chapter of his LU². The topic of this discussion is a courageous if not outrageous Bolzanian contention which, at least on the face of it, flatly contradicts what most philosophers since Aristotle took for granted. Questions, Bolzano claims, are a special kind of propositions and hence truth-evaluable. Let me call this Bolzano's Tenet.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-0207-2_6

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