Formal and Transcendental Logic

Abstract

The chapter introduces Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), the book that Husserl himself once regarded as his most mature work. The chapter presents it in three sections following the layout of the work itself. The first section will focus on Husserl’s introduction where he explains the method and the aim of the chapter. The method used in Formal and Transcendental Logic is radical Besinnung and with it Husserl seeks an intentional explication of the proper sense of formal logic. The second section will be on formal logic which presents several novelties in comparison to Logical Investigations, such as: the three-fold stratification of logic; the radical clarification of the relationship between formal logic and formal mathematics; and with this the definitive clarification of the sense of pure formal mathematics, and connected therewith the genuine sense of formal ontology. The third section focuses on Husserl’s “transcendental logic,” which is needed to make Husserl’s conception of logic complete, i.e., to understand what makes Besinnung radical, how the proper sense of formal logic is reached, and how all this relates to the transcendental constitution of an object in the world. The end of the chapter seeks to situate Husserl’s conception of logic among contemporary approaches.