Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Christoph Sigwart »

Both the current research literature and a tradition stemming from Husserl himself agree that it was Brentano’s notion of intentionality which „gave rise“ to Husserl’s phenomenology. I rely on extensive primary materials, including unpublished sources from four archives, to revisit this thesis. Already a survey of the historical circumstances of Brentano’s second decade in Vienna, when Husserl studied under him, hints at possible discrepancies in the reception of Brentano’s thought, which are further deepened by the editing policy employed by his orthodox students. I analyze an unpublished lecture manuscript of Brentano to find three different notions of intentionality, including a strikingly a-phenomenological one, which I then relate to the discussion by modern scholarship and try to identify those notions of intentionality which were encountered by Husserl as a student of Brentano. Given this heterogeneous matrix of influences, it is far from surprising that a closer look at Husserl’s philosophical juvenilia shows that he misunderstood Brentano’s notion of intentionality and attempted to employ it in a different theoretical context (maybe motivated by an idiosyncratic notion of inner perception). Finally, the notion of intentionality Husserl later attributed to Brentano was probably mitigated to him by indirect sources, including lecture manuscripts copied by the extravagant and less-know student of Brentano, Hans Schmidkunz, and a debate between a contemporary logician Christoph Sigwart and Brentano’s orthodox disciples. The analysis of these transmission mechanisms could reveal a distinct transformation which proved to be instrumental in the development of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. The allegedly decisive influence of Brentano’s notion of intentionality at Husserl thus seems to consist in a productive misunderstanding (which apparently corresponds to Brentano’s surprisingly dismissive evaluation of Husserl after Husserl’s departure from Vienna).

In this article, a little-studied problem of the critical analysis of the philosophical and logical position of the representative of German philosophical tradition Christoph Sigwart (1830–1904) in the university philosophy, especially in the work of a Kharkiv private-docent Isidor Prodan (1854–1919/1920) is presented. At first, the main periods of the scientific and creative career of Isidor Prodan, including his studying at the Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) Gymnasium (1864–1872) and the philosophical faculty at the University of Vienna (1872–1875) are considered. His teacher in Vienna was a very famous German and Austrian professor Franz Brentano (1838–1917), the author of the work “Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint” (1874) and the founder of “descriptive psychology” and intentionalism. Then his teaching of logic and philosophy at the Gymnasiums of Kishinev (Moldova), Izmail (Ukraine), Riga (Latvia), Tartu (Estonia), and Moscow (Russia) from 1876 till 1900 is emphasized. Then the features of the teaching and the publications of Isidor Prodan in his “Kharkiv period” (1906–1916) are pointed out, during which he was a private-docent at the department of philosophy. Isidor Prodan’s works at this time comprise three areas: 1) History of logic (Aristotle, Leibniz, Spencer, Sigwart), 2) philosophy of common sense (Thomas Reid and the Scottish School of Common Sense), 3) critique of Kant and Neo-Kantianism (Hermann Cohen, Wilhelm Windelband, Hans Vaihinger, Heinrich Rickert, Ernst Cassirer e. a.). In the last group, his work “The Truth about Kant (A Secret of his Success)” (1914) was of great importance. His very important work was the monograph “The Cognition and its Object (Justification of Common Sense)” (Kharkiv, 1913). The positions of well-known philosophers (Plato, Descartes, Berkley, Leibniz, and Hume) and less-known authors (Lodge, Preyer, and Schneider) were here analyzed. Isidor Prodan’s critical interpretation of the logical viewpoint of Christoph Sigwart in his two-volume work “Logic” (1873, 3rd ed., 1904) occupies an important place in this analysis. In turn, Isidor Prodan’s important achievement was the popularization of the ideas of this German logician and philosopher, in particular, because of his translation of extracts from the work “Logic”.

This study focuses on Christoph Sigwart’s (1830-1904) most ambitious philosophical work. It presents the idea of a logic of knowledge. This idea does not conform to the Kantian model insofar as it renounces the traditional attribution of universality and necessity to the a priori laws that define the transcendental conditions of knowledge. This results in both problems and advantages. First advantage: such a transcendental logic does not require a special epistemic status with respect to that of other empirical sciences. Second advantage: this logic, woven into the same contingency of these sciences, can provide a proper critique of their results. The main concern, instead, is but one: is this, in fact, still a transcendental logic? If a transcendental logic is supposed to provide us with the conditions for constituting the meaning of the reality of facts, how can its laws be contingent, that is, based on facts or consisting of relations between facts? The choice to explore these issues through Sigwart’s Logik (1st ed. 1873-1878; 2nd ed. 1889-1893; 3rd ed. 1904; 4th ed. 1911; 5th ed. 1924) is motivated by the belief that the cultural context of the work and the arguments discussed can help us get rid of some assumptions that became characteristic of the logics of knowledge during the last century. After a first section devoted to the presentation of the elements of interest and tension typical of the Kantian and empiricist tradition within which Sigwart inscribes his thought, the central sections of the study develop an analytical inquiry into the third edition of the Logik. This analysis follows Sigwart’s exposition in its linear and constructive tension but aims attention at some problematic cores: the judgment, the nature of epistemic justification, the relation between objectivity and truth, the relation between necessity and contingency, the concept, the structure of induction. In the fourth section, the fruits of this analysis are discussed in light of the features traditionally attributed to transcendental logic and the tasks that we could still assign to a critique of knowledge today. Thus, this study is also an introduction, however framed though a specific epistemological interest, to the main philosophical issues addressed by Sigwart and by the empiricist Kantian tradition Sigwart is a part of. The main result of this study is the sketch of a logic of knowledge that is coherent and effective in shedding some light on the meaning of knowledge and in providing tools for the critique of knowledge. A logic, however, that is grounded in contingent grounds: in the communitarian character of acts of knowledge, which makes them capable of constituting shared forms of life. This study argues that such a logic is possible, provided we rethink the connection between judgment and utterance and, more generally, between truth and its expression. This idea of logic, while not yet truly developed, is here proposed as an alternative to the dismissal of the project of a critique of knowledge from a transcendental perspective.

The complexity of socio-technological challenges and the uncertainty of decisions are both increasing. Therefore, there is a need for knowledge-based and option-oriented assessment and advice. Technology assessment (TA) can offer alternative approaches to and perspectives on current decision-making processes. This handbook provides guidance in developing new answers to the problems under investigation. It pursues three objectives. Firstly, it reflects on TA by looking at developments in TA. Secondly, it serves as a compass for orientation by providing heuristics for the systematic contextualisation of TA knowledge. Thirdly and finally, it reveals the prospects for the future development of TA. With contributions by Suzana Alpsancar, Manuel Baumann, Richard Beecroft, Alexander Bogner, Stefan Böschen, Helmut Breitmeier, Andrés Checa, Kerstin Cuhls, Bert Droste-Franke, Elisabeth Ehrensperger, Torsten Fleischer, Antje Grobe, Armin Grunwald, Reinhard Grünwald, Martina Haase, Julia Hahn, Christiane Hauser, Roger Häußling, Leonhard Hennen, Nils Heyen, Regine Kollek, Kornelia Konrad, Jürgen Kopfmüller, Bettina-Johanna Krings, Miltos Ladikas, Roh Pin Lee, Annette Leßmöllmann, Peter Letmathe, Ralf Lindner, Andreas Lösch, Jacob Manderbach, Martin Meister, Linda Nierling, Maren Paegert, Oliver Parodi, Walter Peissl, Witold-Roger Poganietz, Christine Rösch, Maximilian Roßmann, Martin Sand, Jens Schippl, Jan C. Schmidt, Christoph Schneider, Jan-Felix Schrape, Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer, Sandra Schwindenhammer, Hans-Jörg Sigwart, Mahshid Sotoudeh, Magdalena Tanzer, Helge Torgesen, Peter Wehling, Christina Wulf, Petra Zapp and Silke Zimmer-Merkle.

Abstract Husserl attributes to Christoph Sigwart’s Logik the dubious merit of having contributed more than any other work of the time to fostering a psychologistic approach to logic. Husserl terms the brand of sceptical relativism which informs Sigwart’s approach to logic ‘Anthropologism’. He contends that to the psychologistic philosopher only a relativistic notion of truth is available: truth is made to rest on subjective certainty and no room is left for the idea that there are ideal truths which might transcend our apprehension of them. Along similar lines, in the first volume of his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik of 1893, Gottlob Frege had criticized Benno Erdmann’s Logic: idealism and solipsism are, according to Frege’s diagnosis, the inevitable consequences of all philosophical approaches to logic which tend to obliterate the gap between being true and being held true. In his opinion, an instance of such a strategy was the attempt, on the part of psychologistic logicians, to explain the meaning and epistemological status of logical laws by appealing to the psychological processes which go on in the head of ‘normal’ representatives of the species homo sapiens at a given stage of its evolution. The main aim of this chapter is to better understand the motivations for this anti-psychologistic trend. The first few sections of this chapter concentrate on Husserl’s criticism of Sigwart, while the later sections speculate on what Frege might have objected to in Sigwart’s conception of a judgement and its content.

Abstract This chapter investigates the relationship between Frege’s logic and the logics developed by some of his contemporaries, namely, Benno Erdmann, Benno Kerry, and Christoph Sigwart, all of whom Frege accuses of permitting ‘a pernicious intrusion of psychology into logic’. Adherence to psychologism, for Frege, blurs important distinctions such as the one between sense (Sinn) and representation (Vorstellung), or between justification and subjective conviction. This chapter takes a preliminary look at the psychologistic works which Frege can be presumed to have read or regarding which he can be shown to have evinced some interest. An account is given of what Frege meant by ‘psychologism’, followed by a discussion of what Frege might have considered positive features of certain claims and arguments put forward by psychologistic authors.