Schlick and Husserl on the Foundations of Phenomenology

Abstract

A recent article by M. M. Van de Pitte' reviews an old exchange between Edmund Husserl and Mortiz Schlick. Van de Pitte takes Husserl's side and is concerned to show that Schlick's criticisms of the possibility of grounding phenomenology on a special class of judgments, the so-called phenomenological propositions, are seriously wrongheaded. The brief but spirited exchange between Husserl and Schlick centered on a passage in the i9i8 (first) edition of Schlick's General Theory of Knowledge.' Schlick's remarks constitute a critical commentary on Husserl's idea of phenomenological intuition. He interpreted Husserl to be saying that phenomenological intuition is a special sort of intuition or an intuition of special sorts of objects, essences, that are not the objects of usual psychological intuition (awareness). To these comments, Husserl responded in the Foreword to the second volume, part two of the second edition of Logical Investigations published in i92i.' His response was largely rhetorical and highly acrimonious. Primarily, he denied Schlick's claim that phenomenological intuition is supposed to be a special kind of intuition, different from ordinary psychological states. When Schlick revised his General Theory of Knowledge in 1925, he omitted the entire passage that had disturbed Husserl, replacing it with a brief but more pointed paragraph4 which presented phenomenology as a