Bogged Down in Ontologism and Realism. Reinach’s Phenomenological Realist Response to Husserl

Abstract

Adolf Reinach began his education in phenomenology with the teachings of Theodor Lipps before encountering Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations in 1902. What attracted Reinach to the Logical Investigations was the philosophical realism he saw accompanying Husserl’s criticism of psychologism and discussions of the formal structures of meaning therein. However, shortly after Reinach and a number of the Munich Circle members began studying with him in Göttingen, it became clear that the position Husserl espoused was shifting into transcendental idealism. Reinach maintained a theoretical independence from Husserl while embarking on the richest kind of dialogue with his revolutionary texts and teachings. By bringing out the strengths of some of Husserl’s ideas and finding ways to repair the weaknesses of others, Reinach discovered new applications for the realism he found so attractive and significant in the Logical Investigations. I argue that this was how Reinach’s response to Husserl took shape and grew, and set the foundation for the version of phenomenology that Reinach would continue to build upon with his own students until he left for the battlefield of World War I. This article sets forth and explores Reinach’s realist response to Husserl by focusing on his expansion of the a priori, and his ontological work on essence and states of affairs – including his original contributions to jurisprudence.