194-398: Existence is the state of having being or reality in contrast to nonexistence and nonbeing . Existence is often contrasted with essence : the essence of an entity is its essential features or qualities, which can be understood even if one does not know whether the entity exists. Ontology is the philosophical discipline studying the nature and types of existence. Singular existence
388-677: A Privatdozent at Halle from 1887, then as professor, first at Göttingen from 1901, then at Freiburg from 1916 until he retired in 1928, after which he remained highly productive. In 1933, under racial laws of the Nazi Party , Husserl was expelled from the library of the University of Freiburg due to his Jewish family background and months later resigned from the Deutsche Akademie . Following an illness, he died in Freiburg in 1938. Husserl
582-456: A Privatdozent at the University of Halle . In 1891 he published his Philosophie der Arithmetik. Psychologische und logische Untersuchungen which, drawing on his prior studies in mathematics and philosophy, proposed a psychological context as the basis of mathematics. It drew the adverse notice of Gottlob Frege , who criticized its psychologism . In 1901 Husserl with his family moved to
776-576: A TOE, it would necessarily be a set of equations. He wrote, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" On a much broader and more subjective level, private experiences, curiosity, inquiry, and the selectivity involved in personal interpretation of events shapes reality as seen by one and only one person and hence is called phenomenological . While this form of reality might be common to others as well, it could at times also be so unique to oneself as to never be experienced or agreed upon by anyone else. Much of
970-399: A belief or we don't have a belief") with the more permissive, probabilistic notion of credence ("there is an entire spectrum of degrees of belief, not a simple dichotomy between belief and non-belief"). Philosophy addresses two different aspects of the topic of reality: the nature of reality itself, and the relationship between the mind (as well as language and culture) and reality. On
1164-497: A building and being 443.2 meters tall , express what an object is like but do not directly describe whether or not that building exists. According to this view, existence is more fundamental than regular properties because an object cannot have any properties if it does not exist. According to second-order theorists, quantifiers rather than predicates express existence. Predicates are expressions that apply to and classify objects, usually by attributing features to them, such as "is
1358-403: A butterfly" and "is happy". Quantifiers are terms that talk about the quantity of objects that have certain properties. Existential quantifiers express that there is at least one object, like the expressions "some" and "there exists", as in "some cows eat grass" and "there exists an even prime number". In this regard, existence is closely related to counting because to assert that something exists
1552-419: A certain amount. Constructivism and intuitionism are realistic about objects that can be explicitly constructed, but reject the use of the principle of the excluded middle to prove existence by reductio ad absurdum . The traditional debate has focused on whether an abstract (immaterial, intelligible) realm of numbers has existed in addition to the physical (sensible, concrete) world. A recent development
1746-407: A chicken-and-egg problem. Does the lifeworld contextualize and thus compromise the gaze of the pure ego, or does the phenomenological method nonetheless raise the ego up transcendent? These last writings presented the fruits of his professional life. Since his university retirement Husserl had "worked at a tremendous pace, producing several major works." After suffering a fall in the autumn of 1937,
1940-429: A different thick concept of existence; he stated: "to be is to be perceived", meaning all existence is mental. Existence contrasts with nonexistence, a lack of reality. Whether objects can be divided into existent and nonexistent objects is a subject of controversy. This distinction is sometimes used to explain how it is possible to think of fictional objects like dragons and unicorns but the concept of nonexistent objects
2134-415: A distinction between reality and existence. In fact, many analytic philosophers today tend to avoid the term "real" and "reality" in discussing ontological issues. But for those who would treat "is real" the same way they treat "exists", one of the leading questions of analytic philosophy has been whether existence (or reality) is a property of objects. It has been widely held by analytic philosophers that it
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#17328487975792328-509: A feature that inheres in an object's essence founded in the relation between the object and the perceiver. To better understand the world of appearances and objects, phenomenology attempts to identify the invariant features of how objects are perceived and pushes attributions of reality into their role as an attribution about the things people perceive (or an assumption underlying how people perceive objects). The major dividing line in Husserl's thought
2522-698: A firm basis for all human knowledge , including scientific knowledge , and could establish philosophy as a "rigorous science". Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been criticised and developed by his student and assistant Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), by existentialists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), and by other philosophers, such as Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), and Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977). Skeptical hypotheses in philosophy suggest that reality could be very different from what we think it is; or at least that we cannot prove it
2716-414: A general and indeterminate manner. It is, properly speaking, the most universal mathematics of all. Through the posit of certain indeterminate objects (formal-ontological categories) as well as any combination of mathematical axioms, mathematicians can explore the apodeictic connections between them, as long as consistency is preserved. According to Husserl, this view of logic and mathematics accounted for
2910-519: A hierarchical structure. They believed a transcendent entity, called "the One" or "the Good", is responsible for all existence. From it emerges the intellect, which in turn gives rise to the soul and the material world. In medieval philosophy , Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109 CE) formulated the influential ontological argument , which aims to deduce the existence of God from the concept of God. Anselm defined God as
3104-677: A higher degree than others. The orthodox position in ontology is that existence is a second-order property or a property of properties. For example, to say that lions exist means that the property of being a lion is possessed by an entity. A different view states that existence is a first-order property or a property of individuals . This means existence is similar to other properties of individuals, like color and shape. Alexius Meinong and his followers accept this idea and say that not all individuals have this property; they state that there are some individuals, such as Santa Claus , that do not exist. Universalists reject this view; they see existence as
3298-470: A lecture Husserl gave to various Kant Societies in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Halle during 1931 entitled Phänomenologie und Anthropologie . In the war-time 1941 edition of Heidegger's primary work, Being and Time ( Sein und Zeit , first published in 1927), the original dedication to Husserl was removed. This was not due to a negation of the relationship between the two philosophers, however, but rather
3492-406: A logical property that every existing thing shares; they do not include any substantial content about the metaphysical implications of having existence. According to one view, existence is the same as the logical property of self-identity . This view articulates a thin concept of existence because it merely states what exists is identical to itself without discussing any substantial characteristics of
3686-530: A long philosophical tradition in relation to the existence of universals. According to Platonists , universals have general existence as Platonic forms independently of the particulars that exemplify them. According to this view, the universal of redness exists independently of the existence or nonexistence of red objects. Aristotelianism also accepts the existence of universals but says their existence depends on particulars that instantiate them and that they are unable to exist by themselves. According to this view,
3880-455: A negative singular existential is true if the individual it refers to does not exist. Meinongianism has important implications for understandings of quantification. According to an influential view defended by Willard Van Orman Quine , the domain of quantification is restricted to existing objects. This view implies quantifiers carry ontological commitments about what exists and what does not exist. Meinongianism differs from this view by saying
4074-461: A nonexisting object. Closely related to the problem of different types of entities is the question of whether their modes of existence also vary. This is the case according to ontological pluralism, which states entities belonging to different types differ in both their essential features and in the ways they exist. This position is sometimes found in theology; it states God is radically different from his creation and emphasizes his uniqueness by saying
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#17328487975794268-400: A particular function ( Hilary Putnam ). Some have also attempted to offer significant revisions to our notion of belief, including eliminativists about belief who argue that there is no phenomenon in the natural world which corresponds to our folk psychological concept of belief ( Paul Churchland ) and formal epistemologists who aim to replace our bivalent notion of belief ("either we have
4462-455: A person who if asked about the color of snow would assert "snow is white"). There are various ways that contemporary philosophers have tried to describe beliefs, including as representations of ways that the world could be ( Jerry Fodor ), as dispositions to act as if certain things are true ( Roderick Chisholm ), as interpretive schemes for making sense of someone's actions ( Daniel Dennett and Donald Davidson ), or as mental states that fill
4656-457: A physically 'real' world". The hypothesis suggests that worlds corresponding to different sets of initial conditions, physical constants, or altogether different equations should be considered real. The theory can be considered a form of Platonism in that it posits the existence of mathematical entities, but can also be considered a mathematical monism in that it denies that anything exists except mathematical objects. The problem of universals
4850-644: A plan for a second edition of the Logische Untersuchungen . From the Ideen onward, Husserl concentrated on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. The metaphysical problem of establishing the reality of what people perceive, as distinct from the perceiving subject, was of little interest to Husserl in spite of his being a transcendental idealist . Husserl proposed that the world of objects—and of ways in which people direct themselves toward and perceive those objects—is normally conceived of in what he called
5044-425: A priori sciences as having an essentially empirical foundation and a prescriptive or descriptive nature. According to psychologism , logic would not be an autonomous discipline, but a branch of psychology, either proposing a prescriptive and practical "art" of correct judgement (as Brentano and some of his more orthodox students did) or a description of the factual processes of human thought. Husserl pointed out that
5238-440: A priori ' interconnection of bodies, given in perception, is what founds the interconnection of consciousnesses known as transcendental intersubjectivity , which Husserl would go on to describe at length in volumes of unpublished writings. There has been a debate over whether or not Husserl's description of ownness and its movement into intersubjectivity is sufficient to reject the charge of solipsism, to which Descartes, for example,
5432-628: A proper name denotes a non-existent object, it does not have a reference, hence concepts with no objects have no truth value in arguments. Moreover, Husserl did not maintain that predicates of sentences designate concepts. According to Frege the reference of a sentence is a truth value; for Husserl it is a "state of affairs." Frege's notion of "sense" is unrelated to Husserl's noema, while the latter's notions of "meaning" and "object" differ from those of Frege. In detail, Husserl's conception of logic and mathematics differs from that of Frege, who held that arithmetic could be derived from logic. For Husserl this
5626-423: A property of individuals while second-order theories say existence is a second-order property, that is, a property of properties. A central challenge for theories of the nature of existence is an understanding of the possibility of coherently denying the existence of something, like the statement: "Santa Claus does not exist". One difficulty is explaining how the name "Santa Claus" can be meaningful even though there
5820-481: A property of some but not all entities, was first formulated by Alexius Meinong . Its main assertion is that there are some entities that do not exist, meaning objecthood is independent of existence. Proposed examples of nonexistent objects are merely possible objects such as flying pigs, as well as fictional and mythical objects like Sherlock Holmes and Zeus. According to this view, these objects are real and have being, even though they do not exist. Meinong states there
6014-461: A reference base. Husserl sees ontology as a science of essences . Sciences of essences are contrasted with factual sciences : the former are knowable a priori and provide the foundation for the later, which are knowable a posteriori . Ontology as a science of essences is not interested in actual facts , but in the essences themselves, whether they have instances or not . Husserl distinguishes between formal ontology , which investigates
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6208-410: A robust explanation of why statements about what is possible and necessary are true. According to him, possible objects exist in possible worlds while actual objects exist in the actual world. Lewis says the only difference between possible worlds and the actual world is the location of the speaker; the term "actual" refers to the world of the speaker, similar to the way the terms "here" and "now" refer to
6402-456: A rock falls on a plant and damages it, or a plant grows through rock and breaks it. Abstract objects, like numbers, sets, and types, have no location in space and time, and lack causal powers. The distinction between concrete objects and abstract objects is sometimes treated as the most-general division of being. The existence of concrete objects is widely agreed upon but opinions about abstract objects are divided. Realists such as Plato accept
6596-417: A science of the mind (' Geisteswissenschaft ') must be established on as scientific a foundation as the natural sciences have managed: "It is my conviction that intentional phenomenology has for the first time made spirit as spirit the field of systematic scientific experience, thus effecting a total transformation of the task of knowledge." Husserl's thought is revolutionary in several ways, most notably in
6790-436: A second-order property. According to second-order theories, to talk about existence is to talk about which properties have instances. For example, this view says that the sentence "God exists" means "Godhood is instantiated" rather than "God has the property of existing". A key reason against characterizing existence as a property of individuals is that existence differs from regular properties. Regular properties, such as being
6984-695: A series of "formal words" which are necessary to form sentences and have no sensible correlates . Examples of formal words are "a", "the", "more than", "over", "under", "two", "group", and so on. Every sentence must contain formal words to designate what Husserl calls "formal categories". There are two kinds of categories: meaning categories and formal- ontological categories. Meaning categories relate judgments; they include forms of conjunction , disjunction , forms of plural , among others. Formal-ontological categories relate objects and include notions such as set, cardinal number , ordinal number , part and whole, relation, and so on. The way people know these categories
7178-524: A single value be produced with certainty). A closely related term is counterfactual definiteness (CFD), used to refer to the claim that one can meaningfully speak of the definiteness of results of measurements that have not been performed (i.e. the ability to assume the existence of objects, and properties of objects, even when they have not been measured). Local realism is a significant feature of classical mechanics, of general relativity , and of classical electrodynamics ; but not quantum mechanics . In
7372-406: A special position. The founders of quantum mechanics debated the role of the observer, and of them, Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg believed that quantum mechanics expressed the observers knowledge and when an experiment was completed the additional knowledge should be incorporated in the wave function, an effect that came to be called state reduction or collapse . This point of view, which
7566-416: A strict sense, all negative singular existentials are false, including the assertion that "Ronald McDonald does not exist". Universalists can interpret such sentences slightly differently in relation to the context. In everyday life, for example, people use sentences like "Ronald McDonald does not exist" to express the idea that Ronald McDonald does not exist as a concrete object, which is true. Another approach
7760-400: A subclass of possible objects; creationists say that they are artifacts that depend for their existence on the authors who first conceived them. Intentional inexistence is a similar phenomenon concerned with the existence of objects within mental states. This happens when a person perceives or thinks about an object. In some cases, the intentional object corresponds to a real object outside
7954-428: A subconscious set of mental filters formed from their beliefs and experiences, every individual interprets the same world differently, hence "Truth is in the eye of the beholder". His ideas influenced the work of his friend Robert Anton Wilson . The status of abstract entities, particularly numbers, is a topic of discussion in mathematics. In the philosophy of mathematics, the best known form of realism about numbers
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8148-533: A systematic framework we use to structure our experience. Spatial measurements are used to quantify how far apart objects are, and temporal measurements are used to quantitatively compare the interval between (or duration of) events . Although space and time are held to be transcendentally ideal in this sense, they are also empirically real , i.e. not mere illusions. Idealist writers such as J. M. E. McTaggart in The Unreality of Time have argued that time
8342-448: A tendency: in the way that glass objects tend to break, or are disposed to break, even if they do not actually break. Likewise, the mind-independent properties of quantum systems could consist of a tendency to respond to particular measurements with particular values with ascertainable probability. Such an ontology would be metaphysically realistic, without being realistic in the physicist's sense of "local realism" (which would require that
8536-490: A theory of sense and reference before 1891. Commentators argue that Husserl's notion of noema has nothing to do with Frege's notion of sense, because noemata are necessarily fused with noeses which are the conscious activities of consciousness. Noemata have three different levels: Consequently, in intentional activities, even non-existent objects can be constituted, and form part of the whole noema. Frege, however, did not conceive of objects as forming parts of senses: If
8730-622: A universal property of every individual. The concept of existence has been discussed throughout the history of philosophy and already played a role in ancient philosophy , including Presocratic philosophy in Ancient Greece , Hindu and Buddhist philosophy in Ancient India , and Daoist philosophy in ancient China . It is relevant to fields such as logic , mathematics , epistemology , philosophy of mind , philosophy of language , and existentialism . Dictionaries define existence as
8924-419: A universal that is not present in the space and time does not exist. According to nominalists , only particulars have existence and universals do not exist. There is an influential distinction in ontology between concrete and abstract objects . Many concrete objects, like rocks, plants, and other people, are encountered in everyday life. They exist in space and time. They have effects on each other, like when
9118-491: A visit to Franz Brentano his inspiring old teacher and to Constantin Carathéodory the mathematician. Kant and Descartes were also now influencing his thought. In 1910 he became joint editor of the journal Logos . During this period Husserl had delivered lectures on internal time consciousness , which several decades later his former students Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger edited for publication. In 1912 at Freiburg
9312-693: A work now called the EPR paradox , Einstein relied on local realism to suggest that hidden variables were missing in quantum mechanics. However, John S. Bell subsequently showed that the predictions of quantum mechanics are inconsistent with hidden variables, a result known as Bell's theorem . The predictions of quantum mechanics have been verified: Bell's inequalities are violated, meaning either local realism or counterfactual definiteness must be incorrect. Different interpretations of quantum mechanics violate different parts of local realism and/or counterfactual definiteness . The transition from "possible" to "actual"
9506-399: Is Platonic realism , which grants them abstract, immaterial existence. Other forms of realism identify mathematics with the concrete physical universe. Anti-realist stances include formalism and fictionalism . Some approaches are selectively realistic about some mathematical objects but not others. Finitism rejects infinite quantities. Ultra-finitism accepts finite quantities up to
9700-552: Is not a property at all, though this view has lost some ground in recent decades. On the other hand, particularly in discussions of objectivity that have feet in both metaphysics and epistemology, philosophical discussions of "reality" often concern the ways in which reality is, or is not, in some way dependent upon (or, to use fashionable jargon , "constructed" out of) mental and cultural factors such as perceptions, beliefs, and other mental states, as well as cultural artifacts, such as religions and political movements , on up to
9894-404: Is 'presented' to itself, and to each all others are 'presentiated' ( Vergegenwärtigung ), not as parts of nature but as pure consciousness". Ideen advanced his transition to a "transcendental interpretation" of phenomenology, a view later criticized by, among others, Jean-Paul Sartre . In Ideen Paul Ricœur sees the development of Husserl's thought as leading "from the psychological cogito to
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#173284879757910088-420: Is a difference between entities and the fundamental characteristics that make them the entities they are. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) introduced this concept; he calls it the ontological difference and contrasts individual beings with being. According to his response to the question of being, being is not an entity but the background context that makes all individual entities intelligible. Many discussions of
10282-401: Is a major topic of quantum physics , with related theories including quantum darwinism . The quantum mind –body problem refers to the philosophical discussions of the mind–body problem in the context of quantum mechanics. Since quantum mechanics involves quantum superpositions , which are not perceived by observers , some interpretations of quantum mechanics place conscious observers in
10476-454: Is a perennial topic in metaphysics. For instance, Parmenides taught that reality was a single unchanging Being, whereas Heraclitus wrote that all things flow. The 20th-century philosopher Heidegger thought previous philosophers have lost sight of the question of Being (qua Being) in favour of the questions of beings (existing things), so he believed that a return to the Parmenidean approach
10670-410: Is a subjective attitude that a proposition is true or a state of affairs is the case. A subjective attitude is a mental state of having some stance , take, or opinion about something. In epistemology , philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to attitudes about the world which can be either true or false . To believe something is to take it to be true; for instance, to believe that snow
10864-421: Is an ancient problem in metaphysics about whether universals exist. Universals are general or abstract qualities, characteristics, properties , kinds or relations , such as being male/female, solid/liquid/gas or a certain colour, that can be predicated of individuals or particulars or that individuals or particulars can be regarded as sharing or participating in. For example, Scott, Pat, and Chris have in common
11058-399: Is an elementary concept, meaning it cannot be defined in other terms without involving circularity. This would imply characterizing existence or talking about its nature in a non-trivial manner may be difficult or impossible. Disputes about the nature of existence are reflected in the distinction between thin and thick concepts of existence. Thin concepts of existence understand existence as
11252-521: Is an illusion. As well as differing about the reality of time as a whole, metaphysical theories of time can differ in their ascriptions of reality to the past , present and future separately. Time, and the related concepts of process and evolution are central to the system-building metaphysics of A. N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne . The term " possible world " goes back to Leibniz's theory of possible worlds, used to analyse necessity, possibility , and similar modal notions . Modal realism
11446-403: Is an object corresponding to any combination of properties. A more specific criticism rejects the idea that there are incomplete and impossible objects. Universalists agree with Meinongians that existence is a property of individuals but deny there are nonexistent entities. Instead, universalists state existence is a universal property; all entities have it, meaning everything exists. One approach
11640-510: Is an object for any combination of properties. For example, there is an object that only has the single property of "being a singer" with no other properties. This means neither the attribute of "wearing a dress" nor the absence of it applies to this object. Meinong also includes impossible objects like round squares in this classification. According to Meinongians, sentences describing Sherlock Holmes and Zeus refer to nonexisting objects. They are true or false depending on whether these objects have
11834-500: Is between merely possible, contingent , and necessary existence. An entity has necessary existence if it must exist or could not fail to exist. This means that it is not possible to newly create or destroy necessary entities. Entities that exist but could fail to exist are contingent; merely possible entities do not exist but could exist. Most entities encountered in ordinary experience, like telephones, sticks, and flowers, have contingent existence. The contingent existence of telephones
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#173284879757912028-493: Is called negative singular existential and the expression Ronald McDonald is a singular term that seems to refer to an individual. It is not clear how the expression can refer to an individual if, as the sentence asserts, this individual does not exist. According to a solution philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) proposed, singular terms do not refer to individuals but are descriptions of individuals . This theory states negative singular existentials deny an object matching
12222-566: Is clearly defined in that work. Frege's attack seems to be directed at certain foundational doctrines then current in Weierstrass's Berlin School, of which Husserl and Cantor cannot be said to be orthodox representatives. Furthermore, various sources indicate that Husserl changed his mind about psychologism as early as 1890, a year before he published the Philosophy of Arithmetic . Husserl stated that by
12416-453: Is closely related to the problem of modes of existence. This topic is based on the idea that some entities exist to a higher degree or have more being than other entities, similar to the way some properties, such as heat and mass, have degrees. According to philosopher Plato (428/427–348/347 BCE), for example, unchangeable Platonic forms have a higher degree of existence than physical objects. The view that there are different types of entities
12610-417: Is common in metaphysics but the idea that they differ from each other in their modes or degrees of existence is often rejected, implying that a thing either exists or does not exist without in-between alternatives. Metaphysician Peter van Inwagen (1942–present) uses the idea that there is an intimate relationship between existence and quantification to argue against different modes of existence. Quantification
12804-423: Is considered the starting point for the formal theory of wholes and their parts known as mereology . Another important element that Husserl took over from Brentano was intentionality , the notion that the main characteristic of consciousness is that it is always intentional. While often simplistically summarised as "aboutness" or the relationship between mental acts and the external world, Brentano defined it as
12998-469: Is constituted by consciousness needs a noetic correlate (the subjective activities of consciousness). Husserl stated that logic has three strata, each further away from consciousness and psychology than those that precede it. The ontological correlate to the third stratum is the " theory of manifolds ". In formal ontology, it is a free investigation where a mathematician can assign several meanings to several symbols, and all their possible valid deductions in
13192-477: Is contradictory. This conclusion follows from the premises that one can only deny the existence of something by referring to that entity and that one can only refer to entities that exist. Universalists have proposed different ways of interpreting negative singular existentials. According to one view, names of fictional entities like "Ronald McDonald" refer to abstract objects , which exist even though they do not exist in space and time. This means, when understood in
13386-611: Is fundamentally immaterial (e.g. idealism ), whether hypothetical unobservable entities posited by scientific theories exist, whether a god or gods exist, whether numbers and other abstract objects exist, and whether possible worlds exist. Epistemology is concerned with what can be known or inferred as likely and how, whereby in the modern world emphasis is put on reason , empirical evidence and science as sources and methods to determine or investigate reality. A common colloquial usage would have reality mean "perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes toward reality", as in "My reality
13580-505: Is impossible because the world needs to contain at least all necessary entities. Entities that exist on a physical level include objects encountered in everyday life, like stones, trees, and human bodies, as well as entities discussed in modern physics , like electrons and protons. Physical entities can be observed and measured; they possess mass and a location in space and time. Mental entities like perceptions, experiences of pleasure and pain as well as beliefs, desires, and emotions belong to
13774-457: Is known as direct realism when developed to counter indirect or representative realism, also known as epistemological dualism , the philosophical position that our conscious experience is not of the real world itself but of an internal representation, a miniature virtual-reality replica of the world. Timothy Leary coined the influential term Reality Tunnel , by which he means a kind of representative realism . The theory states that, with
13968-500: Is made between existence and essence . Essence refers to the intrinsic nature or defining qualities of an entity. The essence of something determines what kind of entity it is and how it differs from other kinds of entities. Essence corresponds to what an entity is, while existence corresponds to the fact that it is. For instance, it is possible to understand what an object is and grasp its nature even if one does not know whether this object exists. According to some philosophers, there
14162-470: Is no Santa Claus. Second-order theories understand existence as a second-order property rather than a first-order property. They are often seen as the orthodox position in ontology. For instance, the Empire State Building is an individual object and "being 443.2 meters (1,454 ft) tall" is a first-order property of it. "Being instantiated" is a property of "being 443.2 meters tall" and therefore
14356-523: Is no mind or soul over and above such mental events . Finally, anti-realism became a fashionable term for any view which held that the existence of some object depends upon the mind or cultural artifacts. The view that the so-called external world is really merely a social, or cultural, artifact, called social constructionism , is one variety of anti-realism. Cultural relativism is the view that social issues such as morality are not absolute, but at least partially cultural artifact . The nature of being
14550-424: Is not conditioned but rather transcendental: in Husserl's terms, pure consciousness of absolute Being. In Husserl's work, consciousness of any given thing calls for discerning its meaning as an "intentional object". Such an object does not simply strike the senses, to be interpreted or misinterpreted by mental reason; it has already been selected and grasped, grasping being an etymological connotation, of percipere ,
14744-457: Is not generally accepted; some philosophers say the concept is contradictory. Closely related contrasting terms are nothingness and nonbeing. Existence is commonly associated with mind-independent reality but this position is not universally accepted because there could also be forms of mind-dependent existence, such as the existence of an idea inside a person's mind. According to some idealists , this may apply to all of reality. Another contrast
14938-409: Is not the case: mathematics (with the exception of geometry ) is the ontological correlate of logic, and while both fields are related, neither one is strictly reducible to the other. Reacting against authors such as John Stuart Mill , Christoph von Sigwart and his own former teacher Brentano, Husserl criticised their psychologism in mathematics and logic, i.e. their conception of these abstract and
15132-470: Is not your reality." This is often used just as a colloquialism indicating that the parties to a conversation agree, or should agree, not to quibble over deeply different conceptions of what is real. For example, in a religious discussion between friends, one might say (attempting humor), "You might disagree, but in my reality, everyone goes to heaven." Reality can be defined in a way that links it to worldviews or parts of them (conceptual frameworks): Reality
15326-405: Is not. Examples include: Jain philosophy postulates that seven tattva (truths or fundamental principles) constitute reality. These seven tattva are: Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world (the universe) described by science (perhaps ideal science) is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be. Within philosophy of science , it
15520-557: Is often framed as an answer to the question "how is the success of science to be explained?" The debate over what the success of science involves centers primarily on the status of entities that are not directly observable discussed by scientific theories . Generally, those who are scientific realists state that one can make reliable claims about these entities (viz., that they have the same ontological status) as directly observable entities, as opposed to instrumentalism . The most used and studied scientific theories today state more or less
15714-418: Is reflected in the fact that they exist in the present but did not exist in the past, meaning that it is not necessary that they exist. It is an open question whether any entities have necessary existence. According to some nominalists , all concrete objects have contingent existence while all abstract objects have necessary existence. According to some theorists, one or several necessary beings are required as
15908-498: Is related to alethic logic : a proposition is necessary if it is true in all possible worlds, and possible if it is true in at least one. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is a similar idea in science. The philosophical implications of a physical TOE are frequently debated. For example, if philosophical physicalism is true, a physical TOE will coincide with a philosophical theory of everything. The "system building" style of metaphysics attempts to answer all
16102-409: Is related to the counting of objects; according to Inwagen, if there were different modes of entities, people would need different types of numbers to count them. Because the same numbers can be used to count different types of entities, he concludes all entities have the same mode of existence. Theories of the nature of existence aim to explain what it means for something to exist. A central dispute in
16296-405: Is said not to depend on perceptions, beliefs, language, or any other human artifact, one can speak of "realism about " that object. A correspondence theory of knowledge about what exists claims that "true" knowledge of reality represents accurate correspondence of statements about and images of reality with the actual reality that the statements or images are attempting to represent. For example,
16490-556: Is studied by the subdiscipline of metaphysics known as ontology . The terms "being", "reality", and "actuality" are often used as synonyms of "existence", but the exact definition of existence and its connection to these terms is disputed. According to metaphysician Alexius Meinong (1853–1920), all entities have being but not all entities have existence. He argues merely possible objects like Santa Claus have being but lack existence. Ontologist Takashi Yagisawa (20th century–present) contrasts existence with reality; he sees "reality" as
16684-511: Is that singular existence can be expressed in terms of general existence. For instance, the sentence "Angela Merkel exists" can be expressed as "entities that are identical to Angela Merkel exist", where the expression "being identical to Angela Merkel" is understood as a general term. Philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) defends a different position by giving primacy to singular existence and arguing that general existence can be expressed in terms of singular existence. A related question
16878-448: Is that there simply and literally is no reality beyond the perceptions or beliefs we each have about reality. Such attitudes are summarized in popular statements, such as "Perception is reality" or "Life is how you perceive reality" or "reality is what you can get away with" ( Robert Anton Wilson ), and they indicate anti-realism – that is, the view that there is no objective reality, whether acknowledged explicitly or not. Many of
17072-525: Is the mathematical universe hypothesis , the theory that only a mathematical world exists, with the finite, physical world being an illusion within it. An extreme form of realism about mathematics is the mathematical multiverse hypothesis advanced by Max Tegmark . Tegmark's sole postulate is: All structures that exist mathematically also exist physically . That is, in the sense that "in those [worlds] complex enough to contain self-aware substructures [they] will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in
17266-545: Is the existence of individual entities while general existence refers to the existence of concepts or universals . Entities present in space and time have concrete existence in contrast to abstract entities, like numbers and sets. Other distinctions are between possible , contingent , and necessary existence and between physical and mental existence. The common view is that an entity either exists or not with nothing in between, but some philosophers say that there are degrees of existence, meaning that some entities exist to
17460-571: Is the predicate. Quantifier constructions can also be used to express negative existential statements; for instance, the sentence "talking tigers do not exist" can be expressed as "it is not the case that there exist talking tigers". Many ontologists accept that second-order theories provide a correct analysis of many types of existential sentences. It is, however, controversial whether it is correct for all cases. Some problems relate to assumptions associated with everyday language about sentences like " Ronald McDonald does not exist". This type of statement
17654-583: Is the totality of a system, known and unknown. Philosophical questions about the nature of reality or existence or being are considered under the rubric of ontology , which is a major branch of metaphysics in the Western philosophical tradition. Ontological questions also feature in diverse branches of philosophy , including the philosophy of science , of religion , of mathematics , and philosophical logic . These include questions about whether only physical objects are real (i.e., physicalism ), whether reality
17848-404: Is the totality of all things, structures (actual and conceptual), events (past and present) and phenomena, whether observable or not. It is what a world view (whether it be based on individual or shared human experience) ultimately attempts to describe or map. Certain ideas from physics, philosophy, sociology, literary criticism , and other fields shape various theories of reality. One such theory
18042-464: Is the turn to transcendental idealism. In a later period, Husserl began to wrestle with the complicated issues of intersubjectivity , specifically, how communication about an object can be assumed to refer to the same ideal entity ( Cartesian Meditations , Meditation V). Husserl tries new methods of bringing his readers to understand the importance of phenomenology to scientific inquiry (and specifically to psychology ) and what it means to "bracket"
18236-488: Is the view, notably propounded by David Kellogg Lewis , that all possible worlds are as real as the actual world. In short: the actual world is regarded as merely one among an infinite set of logically possible worlds, some "nearer" to the actual world and some more remote. Other theorists may use the Possible World framework to express and explore problems without committing to it ontologically. Possible world theory
18430-503: Is through a faculty of understanding called "categorial intuition". Through sensible intuition, consciousness constitutes what Husserl calls a "situation of affairs" ( Sachlage ). It is a passive constitution where objects themselves are presented. To this situation of affairs, through categorial intuition, people are able to constitute a " state of affairs " ( Sachverhalt ). One situation of affairs through objective acts of consciousness (acts of constituting categorially) can serve as
18624-422: Is to assert that the corresponding concept has one or more instances. Second-order views imply a sentence like " egg-laying mammals exist" is misleading because the word "exist" is used as a predicate in them. These views say the true logical form is better expressed in reformulations like "there exist entities that are egg-laying mammals". This way, "existence" has the role of a quantifier and "egg-laying mammals"
18818-403: Is to say existence is the same as self-identity. According to the law of identity , every object is identical to itself or has the property of self-identity. This can be expressed in predicate logic as ∀ x ( x = x ) {\displaystyle \forall x(x=x)} . An influential argument in favor of universalism is that the denial of the existence of something
19012-551: Is to understand negative singular existentials as neither true nor false but meaningless because their singular terms do not refer to anything. Western philosophy originated with the Presocratic philosophers , who aimed to replace earlier mythological accounts of the universe by providing rational explanations based on foundational principles of all existence. Some, like Thales (c. 624–545 BCE) and Heraclitus (c. 540–480 BCE), suggested concrete principles like water and fire are
19206-405: Is whether there can be general existence without singular existence. According to philosopher Henry S. Leonard (1905–1967), a property only has general existence if there is at least one actual object that instantiates it. Philosopher Nicholas Rescher (1928–2024), by contrast, states that properties can exist if they have no actual instances, like the property of "being a unicorn". This question has
19400-405: Is white is comparable to accepting the truth of the proposition "snow is white". However, holding a belief does not require active introspection . For example, few individuals carefully consider whether or not the sun will rise tomorrow, simply assuming that it will. Moreover, beliefs need not be occurrent (e.g. a person actively thinking "snow is white"), but can instead be dispositional (e.g.
19594-739: The Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium by the Franciscan priest Herman Van Breda . There they were deposited at Leuven to form the Husserl-Archives of the Higher Institute of Philosophy . Much of the material in his research manuscripts has since been published in the Husserliana critical edition series. In his first works, Husserl combined mathematics, psychology, and philosophy with
19788-783: The Deutsche Akademie . Later Husserl lectured at Prague in 1935 and Vienna in 1936, which resulted in a very differently styled work that, while innovative, is no less problematic: Die Krisis (Belgrade 1936). Husserl describes here the cultural crisis gripping Europe, then approaches a philosophy of history, discussing Galileo , Descartes, several British philosophers, and Kant . The apolitical Husserl before had specifically avoided such historical discussions, pointedly preferring to go directly to an investigation of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty and others question whether Husserl here does not undercut his own position, in that Husserl had attacked in principle historicism , while specifically designing his phenomenology to be rigorous enough to transcend
19982-584: The Greek phainómenon , meaning "that which appears", and lógos , meaning "study". In Husserl's conception, phenomenology is primarily concerned with making the structures of consciousness, and the phenomena which appear in acts of consciousness, objects of systematic reflection and analysis. Such reflection was to take place from a highly modified " first person " viewpoint, studying phenomena not as they appear to "my" consciousness, but to any consciousness whatsoever. Husserl believed that phenomenology could thus provide
20176-563: The Philosophy of Arithmetic helped turn Husserl towards modern Platonism , but he had already discovered the work of Bernard Bolzano independently around 1890/91. In his Logical Investigations , Husserl explicitly mentioned Bolzano, G. W. Leibniz and Hermann Lotze as inspirations for his newer position. Husserl's review of Ernst Schröder , published before Frege's landmark 1892 article, clearly distinguishes sense from reference ; thus Husserl's notions of noema and object also arose independently. Likewise, in his criticism of Frege in
20370-612: The Philosophy of Arithmetic , Husserl remarks on the distinction between the content and the extension of a concept. Moreover, the distinction between the subjective mental act, namely the content of a concept, and the (external) object, was developed independently by Brentano and his school , and may have surfaced as early as Brentano's 1870s lectures on logic. Scholars such as J. N. Mohanty , Claire Ortiz Hill , and Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock , among others, have argued that Husserl's so-called change from psychologism to Platonism came about independently of Frege's review. For example,
20564-589: The University of Freiburg (in Freiburg im Breisgau ) where he continued bringing his work in philosophy to fruition, now as a full professor. Edith Stein served as his personal assistant during his first few years in Freiburg, followed later by Martin Heidegger from 1920 to 1923. The mathematician Hermann Weyl began corresponding with him in 1918. Husserl gave four lectures on Phenomenological method at University College London in 1922. The University of Berlin in 1923 called on him to relocate there, but he declined
20758-510: The University of Göttingen , where he taught as extraordinarius professor . Just prior to this a major work of his, Logische Untersuchungen (Halle, 1900–1901), was published. Volume One contains seasoned reflections on "pure logic" in which he carefully refutes "psychologism". This work was well received and became the subject of a seminar given by Wilhelm Dilthey ; Husserl in 1905 traveled to Berlin to visit Dilthey. Two years later in Italy he paid
20952-513: The University of Halle , seeking to obtain his habilitation which would qualify him to teach at the university level. There, under Stumpf's supervision, he wrote Über den Begriff der Zahl ( On the Concept of Number ) in 1887, which would serve later as the basis for his first important work, Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891). In 1887 Husserl married Malvine Steinschneider, a union that would last over fifty years. In 1892 their daughter Elizabeth
21146-482: The University of Leipzig from 1876 to 1878, Husserl studied mathematics, physics, and astronomy. At Leipzig, he was inspired by philosophy lectures given by Wilhelm Wundt , one of the founders of modern psychology. Then he moved to the Frederick William University of Berlin (the present-day Humboldt University of Berlin ) in 1878 where he continued his study of mathematics under Leopold Kronecker and
21340-460: The absolute a positive one. The question of direct or "naïve" realism , as opposed to indirect or "representational" realism , arises in the philosophy of perception and of mind out of the debate over the nature of conscious experience ; the epistemological question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by neural processes in our brain. Naïve realism
21534-472: The racial laws of the new National Socialist German Workers Party were enacted. On 6 April Husserl was banned from using the library at the University of Freiburg, or any other academic library; the following week, after a public outcry, he was reinstated. Yet his colleague Heidegger was elected Rector of the university on 21–22 April, and joined the Nazi Party . By contrast, in July Husserl resigned from
21728-503: The scientific method can verify that a statement is true based on the observable evidence that a thing exists. Many humans can point to the Rocky Mountains and say that this mountain range exists, and continues to exist even if no one is observing it or making statements about it. One can also speak of anti -realism about the same objects. Anti-realism is the latest in a long series of terms for views opposed to realism. Perhaps
21922-458: The types of existing entities revolve around the definitions of different types, the existence or nonexistence of entities of a specific type, the way entities of different types are related to each other, and whether some types are more fundamental than others. Examples are the existence or nonexistence of souls ; whether there are abstract, fictional, and universal entities; and the existence or nonexistence of possible worlds and objects besides
22116-516: The "natural attitude", which is characterized by a belief that objects exist distinct from the perceiving subject and exhibit properties that people see as emanating from them (this attitude is also called physicalist objectivism ). Husserl proposed a radical new phenomenological way of looking at objects by examining how people, in their many ways of being intentionally directed toward them, actually "constitute" them (to be distinguished from materially creating objects or objects merely being figments of
22310-414: The 20th century, views similar to Berkeley's were called phenomenalism . Phenomenalism differs from Berkeleyan idealism primarily in that Berkeley believed that minds, or souls, are not merely ideas nor made up of ideas, whereas varieties of phenomenalism, such as that advocated by Russell , tended to go farther to say that the mind itself is merely a collection of perceptions, memories, etc., and that there
22504-452: The academic discourse about the nature of existence is whether existence is a property of individuals. An individual is a unique entity, like Socrates or a particular apple. A property is something that is attributed to an entity, like "being human" or "being red", and usually expresses a quality or feature of that entity. The two main theories of existence are first-order and second-order theories. First-order theories understand existence as
22698-480: The actual world. These discussions cover the topics of the basic stuff or constituents underlying all reality and the most general features of entities. There is a distinction between singular existence and general existence. Singular existence is the existence of individual entities. For example, the sentence " Angela Merkel exists" expresses the existence of one particular person. General existence pertains to general concepts, properties, or universals . For instance,
22892-550: The anti-Jewish legislation of April 1933. However, among other disabilities Husserl was unable to publish his works in Nazi Germany [see above footnote to Die Krisis (1936)]. It was also rumoured that his former pupil Martin Heidegger informed Husserl that he was discharged, but it was actually the previous rector. Apparently Husserl and Heidegger had moved apart during the 1920s, which became clearer after 1928 when Husserl retired and Heidegger succeeded to his university chair. In
23086-420: The assistant to Karl Weierstrass . Yet already Husserl had felt the desire to pursue philosophy. Then professor Weierstrass became very ill. Husserl became free to return to Vienna where, after serving a short military duty, he devoted his attention to philosophy. In 1884 at the University of Vienna he attended the lectures of Franz Brentano on philosophy and philosophical psychology. Brentano introduced him to
23280-415: The basis for constituting multiple states of affairs. For example, suppose a and b are two sensible objects in a certain situation of affairs. It can be used as the basis to say, " a < b " and " b > a ", two judgments which designate the same state of affairs. For Husserl a sentence has a proposition or judgment as its meaning, and refers to a state of affairs which has a situation of affairs as
23474-487: The comprehension of reality. Out of all the realities, the reality of everyday life is the most important one since our consciousness requires us to be completely aware and attentive to the experience of everyday life. In philosophy , potentiality and actuality are a pair of closely connected principles which Aristotle used to analyze motion , causality , ethics , and physiology in his Physics , Metaphysics , Nicomachean Ethics , and De Anima . A belief
23668-400: The concepts of science and philosophy are often defined culturally and socially . This idea was elaborated by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). The Social Construction of Reality , a book about the sociology of knowledge written by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann , was published in 1966. It explained how knowledge is acquired and used for
23862-533: The descriptions exists without referring to a nonexistent individual. Following this approach, the sentence "Ronald McDonald does not exist" expresses the idea: "it is not the case there is a unique happy hamburger clown". According to first-order theories, existence is a property of individuals. These theories are less-widely accepted than second-order theories but also have some influential proponents. There are two types of first-order theories: Meinongianism and universalism. Meinongianism, which describes existence as
24056-462: The difference affects both God's features and God's mode of existence. Another form of ontological pluralism distinguishes the existence of material objects from the existence of space-time . According to this view, material objects have relative existence because they exist in space-time; the existence of space-time itself is not relative in this sense because it just exists without existing within another space-time. The topic of degrees of existence
24250-675: The different formal categories are the objects of study, not the sensible objects themselves. The problem with the psychological approach to mathematics and logic is that it fails to account for the fact that this approach is about formal categories, and not simply about abstractions from sensibility alone. The reason why sensible objects are not dealt with in mathematics is because of another faculty of understanding called "categorial abstraction." Through this faculty people are able to get rid of sensible components of judgments, and just focus on formal categories themselves. Thanks to " eidetic reduction " (or "essential intuition"), people are able to grasp
24444-472: The distinction between "natural" and "phenomenological" modes of understanding. In the former, sense-perception in correspondence with the material realm constitutes the known reality, and understanding is premised on the accuracy of the perception and the objective knowability of what is called the "real world". Phenomenological understanding strives to be rigorously "presuppositionless" by means of what Husserl calls " phenomenological reduction ". This reduction
24638-490: The early modern period include the Leibniz 's Monadology , Descartes 's Dualism , Spinoza 's Monism . Hegel 's Absolute idealism and Whitehead 's Process philosophy were later systems. Other philosophers do not believe its techniques can aim so high. Some scientists think a more mathematical approach than philosophy is needed for a TOE, for instance Stephen Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time that even if we had
24832-434: The essence of objectivity in general , and regional ontologies , which study regional essences that are shared by all entities belonging to the region. Regions correspond to the highest genera of concrete entities : material nature, personal consciousness and interpersonal spirit. Husserl's method for studying ontology and sciences of essence in general is called eidetic variation . It involves imagining an object of
25026-436: The existence of merely possible objects. According to actualism , only actual entities have being; this includes both contingent and necessary entities but excludes merely possible entities. Possibilists reject this view and state there are also merely possible objects besides actual objects. For example, metaphysician David Lewis (1941–2001) states that possible objects exist in the same way as actual objects so as to provide
25220-415: The explanatory foundation of the cosmos. For instance, the philosophers Avicenna (980–1037) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) say that God has necessary existence. A few philosophers, like Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), see God and the world as the same thing , and say that all entities have necessary existence to provide a unified and rational explanation of everything. There are many academic debates about
25414-550: The failure of anti-psychologists to defeat psychologism was a result of being unable to distinguish between the foundational, theoretical side of logic, and the applied, practical side. Pure logic does not deal at all with "thoughts" or "judgings" as mental episodes but about a priori laws and conditions for any theory and any judgments whatsoever, conceived as propositions in themselves. Since "truth-in-itself" has "being-in-itself" as ontological correlate, and since psychologists reduce truth (and hence logic) to empirical psychology,
25608-461: The first volume of his Logical Investigations , the Prolegomena of Pure Logic , Husserl, while attacking the psychologistic point of view in logic and mathematics, also appears to reject much of his early work, although the forms of psychologism analysed and refuted in the Prolegomena did not apply directly to his Philosophy of Arithmetic . Some scholars question whether Frege's negative review of
25802-561: The first was idealism , so called because reality was said to be in the mind, or a product of our ideas . Berkeleyan idealism is the view, propounded by the Irish empiricist George Berkeley , that the objects of perception are actually ideas in the mind. In this view, one might be tempted to say that reality is a "mental construct"; this is not quite accurate, however, since, in Berkeley's view, perceptual ideas are created and coordinated by God. By
25996-563: The following way: if someone is standing in front of a house, they have a proper, direct presentation of that house, but if they are looking for it and ask for directions, then these directions (e.g. the house on the corner of this and that street) are an indirect, improper presentation. In other words, the person can have a proper presentation of an object if it is actually present, and an improper (or symbolic, as Husserl also calls it) one if they only can indicate that object through signs, symbols, etc. Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900–1901)
26190-520: The following year one of them, Wolfgang Husserl, was badly injured. On 8 March 1916, on the battlefield of Verdun , Wolfgang was killed in action. The next year his other son Gerhart Husserl was wounded in the war but survived. His own mother Julia died. In November 1917 one of his outstanding students and later a noted philosophy professor in his own right, Adolf Reinach , was killed in the war while serving in Flanders . Husserl had transferred in 1916 to
26384-487: The goal of providing a sound foundation for mathematics. He analyzed the psychological process needed to obtain the concept of number and then built up a theory on this analysis. He used methods and concepts taken from his teachers. From Weierstrass he derived the idea of generating the concept of number by counting a certain collection of objects. From Brentano and Stumpf he took the distinction between proper and improper presenting. In an example, Husserl explained this in
26578-490: The greatest conceivable being. He reasoned that an entity that did not exist outside his mind would not be the greatest conceivable being, leading him to the conclusion God exists. Reality Reality is the sum or aggregate of all that is real or existent within the universe , as opposed to that which is only imaginary , nonexistent or nonactual. The term is also used to refer to the ontological status of things, indicating their existence . In physical terms, reality
26772-467: The highest genera. Husserl believed that truth-in-itself has as ontological correlate being-in-itself , just as meaning categories have formal-ontological categories as correlates. Logic is a formal theory of judgment , that studies the formal a priori relations among judgments using meaning categories. Mathematics, on the other hand, is formal ontology ; it studies all the possible forms of being (of objects). Hence for both logic and mathematics,
26966-642: The highest type of existence, and saw material objects as imperfect and impermanent copies of Platonic forms. Philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) accepted Plato's idea that forms are different from matter, but he challenged the idea that forms have a higher type of existence. Instead, he believed forms cannot exist without matter. He stated: "being is said in many ways" and explored how different types of entities have different modes of existence. For example, he distinguished between substances and their accidents , and between potentiality and actuality . Neoplatonists like Plotinus (204–270 CE) suggested reality has
27160-414: The idea that abstract objects have independent existence. Some realists say abstract objects have the same mode of existence as concrete objects; according to others, they exist in a different way. Anti-realists state that abstract objects do not exist, a view that is often combined with the idea that existence requires a location in space and time or the ability to causally interact. A further distinction
27354-491: The imagination); in the Phenomenological standpoint, the object ceases to be something simply "external" and ceases to be seen as providing indicators about what it is, and becomes a grouping of perceptual and functional aspects that imply one another under the idea of a particular object or "type". The notion of objects as real is not expelled by phenomenology, but "bracketed" as a way in which people regard objects—instead of
27548-424: The important questions in a coherent way, providing a complete picture of the world. Plato and Aristotle could be said to be early examples of comprehensive systems. In the early modern period (17th and 18th centuries), the system-building scope of philosophy is often linked to the rationalist method of philosophy, that is the technique of deducing the nature of the world by pure a priori reason. Examples from
27742-422: The journal Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung ("Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research") was founded by Husserl and his school, and which published articles of their phenomenological movement from 1913 to 1930. His important work Ideen was published in its first issue (Vol. 1, Issue 1, 1913). Before beginning Ideen , Husserl's thought had reached the stage where "each subject
27936-648: The kind of experience deemed spiritual occurs on this level of reality. Phenomenology is a philosophical method developed in the early years of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and a circle of followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany. Subsequently, phenomenological themes were taken up by philosophers in France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's work. The word phenomenology comes from
28130-403: The kind under investigation and varying its features. The changed feature is inessential to this kind if the object can survive its change, otherwise it belongs to the kind's essence . For example, a triangle remains a triangle if one of its sides is extended but it ceases to be a triangle if a fourth side is added. Regional ontology involves applying this method to the essences corresponding to
28324-420: The limits of all possible knowledge, Husserl redefined phenomenology as a transcendental-idealist philosophy. Husserl's thought profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy , and he remains a notable figure in contemporary philosophy and beyond. Husserl studied mathematics, taught by Karl Weierstrass and Leo Königsberger , and philosophy taught by Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf . He taught philosophy as
28518-400: The limits of history. On the contrary, Husserl may be indicating here that historical traditions are merely features given to the pure ego's intuition, like any other. A longer section follows on the " lifeworld " [ Lebenswelt ], one not observed by the objective logic of science, but a world seen through subjective experience. Yet a problem arises similar to that dealing with 'history' above,
28712-422: The main characteristic of mental phenomena , by which they could be distinguished from physical phenomena . Every mental phenomenon, every psychological act, has a content, is directed at an object (the intentional object ). Every belief, desire, etc. has an object that it is about: the believed, the wanted. Brentano used the expression "intentional inexistence" to indicate the status of the objects of thought in
28906-547: The mathematical sciences. After obtaining his PhD in mathematics, Husserl began analyzing the foundations of mathematics from a psychological point of view. In his habilitation thesis , On the Concept of Number (1886) and in his Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), Husserl sought, by employing Brentano's descriptive psychology , to define the natural numbers in a way that advanced the methods and techniques of Karl Weierstrass , Richard Dedekind , Georg Cantor , Gottlob Frege , and other contemporary mathematicians. Later, in
29100-399: The mental state, like when accurately perceiving a tree in the garden. In other cases, the intentional object does not have a real counterpart, like when thinking about Bigfoot . The problem of intentional inexistence is the challenge of explaining how one can think about entities that do not exist since this seems to have the paradoxical implication that the thinker stands in a relation to
29294-553: The mind. Some anti-realists whose ontological position is that objects outside the mind do exist, nevertheless doubt the independent existence of time and space. Kant , in the Critique of Pure Reason , described time as an a priori notion that, together with other a priori notions such as space , allows us to comprehend sense experience . Kant denies that either space or time are substance , entities in themselves, or learned by experience; he holds rather that both are elements of
29488-418: The mind. The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, was the key feature to distinguish mental phenomena and physical phenomena, because physical phenomena lack intentionality altogether. Some years after the 1900–1901 publication of his main work, the Logische Untersuchungen ( Logical Investigations ), Husserl made some key conceptual elaborations which led him to assert that to study
29682-463: The more-fundamental term because it equally characterizes all entities and defines existence as a relative term that connects an entity to the world it inhabits. According to philosopher Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), actuality is narrower than existence because only actual entities can produce and undergo changes, in contrast to non-actual existing entities like numbers and sets . According to some philosophers, like Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), existence
29876-516: The most-fundamental level. Materialists usually explain mental entities in terms of physical processes; for example, as brain states or as patterns of neural activation. Idealism, a minority view in contemporary philosophy, rejects matter as ultimate and views the mind as the most basic reality. Dualists like René Descartes (1596–1650) believe both physical and mental entities exist on the most-fundamental level. They state they are connected to one another in several ways but that one cannot be reduced to
30070-550: The natural attitude. The Crisis of the European Sciences is Husserl's unfinished work that deals most directly with these issues. In it, Husserl for the first time attempts a historical overview of the development of Western philosophy and science, emphasizing the challenges presented by their increasingly one-sidedly empirical and naturalistic orientation. Husserl declares that mental and spiritual reality possess their own reality independent of any physical basis, and that
30264-427: The nature of existence. Thick concepts of existence encompass a metaphysical analysis of what it means that something exists and what essential features existence implies. According to one proposal, to exist is to be present in space and time, and to have effects on other things. This definition is controversial because it implies abstract objects such as numbers do not exist. Philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753) gave
30458-433: The objectivity of a series of mathematical developments of his time, such as n -dimensional manifolds (both Euclidean and non-Euclidean ), Hermann Grassmann 's theory of extensions , William Rowan Hamilton 's Hamiltonians , Sophus Lie 's theory of transformation groups , and Cantor's set theory . Jacob Klein was one student of Husserl who pursued this line of inquiry, seeking to "desedimentize" mathematics and
30652-508: The offer. In 1926 Heidegger dedicated his book Sein und Zeit ( Being and Time ) to him "in grateful respect and friendship." Husserl remained in his professorship at Freiburg until he requested retirement, teaching his last class on 25 July 1928. A Festschrift to celebrate his seventieth birthday was presented to him on 8 April 1929. Despite retirement, Husserl gave several notable lectures. The first, at Paris in 1929, led to Méditations cartésiennes (Paris 1931). Husserl here reviews
30846-430: The one hand, ontology is the study of being, and the central topic of the field is couched, variously, in terms of being, existence, "what is", and reality. The task in ontology is to describe the most general categories of reality and how they are interrelated. If a philosopher wanted to proffer a positive definition of the concept "reality", it would be done under this heading. As explained above, some philosophers draw
31040-399: The other hand, is the view that universals are real entities, but their existence is dependent on the particulars that exemplify them. Nominalism and conceptualism are the main forms of anti-realism about universals. A traditional realist position in ontology is that time and space have existence apart from the human mind. Idealists deny or doubt the existence of objects independent of
31234-562: The other. Fictional entities are entities that exist as inventions inside works of fiction . For example, Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character in Arthur Conan Doyle 's book A Study in Scarlet and flying carpets are fictional objects in the folktales One Thousand and One Nights . According to anti-realism, fictional entities do not form part of reality in any substantive sense. Possibilists, by contrast, see fictional entities as
31428-399: The phenomenological epoché (or phenomenological reduction), presented earlier in his pivotal Ideen (1913), in terms of a further reduction of experience to what he calls a 'sphere of ownness.' From within this sphere, which Husserl enacts to show the impossibility of solipsism, the transcendental ego finds itself always already paired with the lived body of another ego, another monad. This '
31622-405: The philosopher became ill with pleurisy . Edmund Husserl died in Freiburg on 27 April 1938, having just turned 79. His wife Malvine survived him. Eugen Fink , his research assistant, delivered his eulogy . Gerhard Ritter was the only Freiburg faculty member to attend the funeral, as an anti-Nazi protest. Husserl was rumoured to have been denied the use of the library at Freiburg as a result of
31816-511: The possibility, impossibility, necessity and contingency among concepts and among formal categories. Categorial intuition, along with categorial abstraction and eidetic reduction, are the basis for logical and mathematical knowledge. Husserl criticized the logicians of his day for not focusing on the relation between subjective processes that offer objective knowledge of pure logic. All subjective activities of consciousness need an ideal correlate, and objective logic (constituted noematically ) as it
32010-427: The properties ascribed to them. For instance, the sentence "Pegasus has wings" is true because having wings is a property of Pegasus, even though Pegasus lacks the property of existing. One key motivation of Meinongianism is to explain how negative singular existentials like "Ronald McDonald does not exist" can be true. Meinongians accept the idea that singular terms like "Ronald McDonald" refer to individuals. For them,
32204-403: The realm of the mind; they are primarily associated with conscious experiences but also include unconscious states like unconscious beliefs, desires, and memories. The mind–body problem concerns the ontological status of and relation between physical and mental entities and is a frequent topic in metaphysics and philosophy of mind . According to materialists , only physical entities exist on
32398-547: The recent regime change in Germany and its consequences: The future alone will judge which was the true Germany in 1933, and who were the true Germans—those who subscribe to the more or less materialistic-mythical racial prejudices of the day, or those Germans pure in heart and mind, heirs to the great Germans of the past whose tradition they revere and perpetuate. After his death, Husserl's manuscripts, amounting to approximately 40,000 pages of " Gabelsberger " stenography and his complete research library, were in 1939 smuggled to
32592-533: The renowned Karl Weierstrass . In Berlin he found a mentor in Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk , then a former philosophy student of Franz Brentano and later the first president of Czechoslovakia . There Husserl also attended Friedrich Paulsen 's philosophy lectures. In 1881 he left for the University of Vienna to complete his mathematics studies under the supervision of Leo Königsberger (a former student of Weierstrass). At Vienna in 1883 he obtained his PhD with
32786-411: The review falsely accuses Husserl of subjectivizing everything, so that no objectivity is possible, and falsely attributes to him a notion of abstraction whereby objects disappear until all that remains are numbers as mere ghosts. Contrary to what Frege states, in Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic there are already two different kinds of representations: subjective and objective. Moreover, objectivity
32980-707: The root of "perceive". From Logical Investigations (1900/1901) to Experience and Judgment (published in 1939), Husserl expressed clearly the difference between meaning and object . He identified several different kinds of names. For example, there are names that have the role of properties that uniquely identify an object. Each of these names expresses a meaning and designates the same object. Examples of this are "the victor in Jena" and "the loser in Waterloo", or "the equilateral triangle" and "the equiangular triangle"; in both cases, both names express different meanings, but designate
33174-413: The root of existence. Anaximander (c. 610–545 BCE) opposed this position; he believed the source must lie in an abstract principle that is beyond the world of human perception. Plato (428/427–348/347 BCE) argued that different types of entities have different degrees of existence and that shadows and images exist in a weaker sense than regular material objects. He said unchangeable Platonic forms have
33368-428: The same object. There are names which have no meaning, but have the role of designating an object: "Aristotle", "Socrates", and so on. Finally, there are names which designate a variety of objects. These are called "universal names"; their meaning is a " concept " and refers to a series of objects (the extension of the concept). The way people know sensible objects is called " sensible intuition ". Husserl also identifies
33562-406: The sentence "politicians exist" states the general term "politician" has instances without referring to a particular politician. Singular and general existence are closely related to each other, and some philosophers have tried to explain one as a special case of the other. For example, according to Frege, general existence is more basic than singular existence. One argument in favor of this position
33756-477: The spatial and temporal location of the speaker. The problem of contingent and necessary existence is closely related to the ontological question of why there is anything at all or why is there something rather than nothing . According to one view, the existence of something is a contingent fact, meaning the world could have been totally empty. This is not possible if there are necessary entities, which could not have failed to exist. In this case, global nothingness
33950-493: The state of being real and to exist as having being or participating in reality . Existence sets real entities apart from imaginary ones, and can refer both to individual entities or to the totality of reality. The word "existence" entered the English language in the late 14th century from old French and has its roots in the medieval Latin term ex(s)istere , which means "to stand forth", "to appear", and "to arise". Existence
34144-448: The structure of consciousness, one would have to distinguish between the act of consciousness and the phenomena at which it is directed (the objects as intended). Knowledge of essences would only be possible by " bracketing " all assumptions about the existence of an external world. This procedure he called " epoché ". These new concepts prompted the publication of the Ideen ( Ideas ) in 1913, in which they were at first incorporated, and
34338-425: The summer of 1929 Husserl had studied carefully selected writings of Heidegger, coming to the conclusion that on several of their key positions they differed: e.g., Heidegger substituted Dasein ["Being-there"] for the pure ego, thus transforming phenomenology into an anthropology, a type of psychologism strongly disfavored by Husserl. Such observations of Heidegger, along with a critique of Max Scheler , were put into
34532-523: The time he published that book, he had already changed his mind—that he had doubts about psychologism from the very outset. He attributed this change of mind to his reading of Leibniz, Bolzano, Lotze, and David Hume . Husserl makes no mention of Frege as a decisive factor in this change. In his Logical Investigations , Husserl mentions Frege only twice, once in a footnote to point out that he had retracted three pages of his criticism of Frege's The Foundations of Arithmetic , and again to question Frege's use of
34726-471: The time, his mind remained open for the religious phenomenon as for any other genuine experience." At times Husserl saw his goal as one of moral "renewal". Although a steadfast proponent of a radical and rational autonomy in all things, Husserl could also speak "about his vocation and even about his mission under God's will to find new ways for philosophy and science," observes Spiegelberg. Following his PhD in mathematics, Husserl returned to Berlin to work as
34920-534: The transcendental cogito". As phenomenology further evolves, it leads (when viewed from another vantage point in Husserl's 'labyrinth') to " transcendental subjectivity ". Also in Ideen Husserl explicitly elaborates the phenomenological and eidetic reductions . Ivan Ilyin and Karl Jaspers visited Husserl at Göttingen. In October 1914 both his sons were sent to fight on the Western Front of World War I , and
35114-505: The truth. Realism in the sense used by physicists does not equate to realism in metaphysics. The latter is the claim that the world is mind-independent: that even if the results of a measurement do not pre-exist the act of measurement, that does not require that they are the creation of the observer. Furthermore, a mind-independent property does not have to be the value of some physical variable such as position or momentum . A property can be dispositional (or potential), i.e. it can be
35308-424: The universal quality of being human or humanity . The realist school claims that universals are real – they exist and are distinct from the particulars that instantiate them. There are various forms of realism. Two major forms are Platonic realism and Aristotelian realism . Platonic realism is the view that universals are real entities and they exist independent of particulars. Aristotelian realism , on
35502-450: The vague notion of a common cultural world view , or Weltanschauung . The view that there is a reality independent of any beliefs, perceptions, etc., is called realism . More specifically, philosophers are given to speaking about "realism about " this and that, such as realism about universals or realism about the external world. Generally, where one can identify any class of object, the existence or essential characteristics of which
35696-460: The widest domain of quantification includes both existing and nonexisting objects. Some aspects of Meinongianism are controversial and have received substantial criticism. According to one objection, one cannot distinguish between being an object and being an existing object. A closely related criticism states objects cannot have properties if they do not exist. A further objection is that Meinongianism leads to an "overpopulated universe" because there
35890-571: The word Bedeutung to designate "reference" rather than "meaning" (sense). In a letter dated 24 May 1891, Frege thanked Husserl for sending him a copy of the Philosophy of Arithmetic and Husserl's review of Ernst Schröder 's Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik . In the same letter, Frege used the review of Schröder's book to analyze Husserl's notion of the sense of reference of concept words. Hence Frege recognized, as early as 1891, that Husserl distinguished between sense and reference. Consequently, Frege and Husserl independently elaborated
36084-599: The work Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung ( Contributions to the Calculus of variations ). Evidently as a result of his becoming familiar with the New Testament during his twenties, Husserl asked to be baptized into the Lutheran Church in 1886. Husserl's father Adolf had died in 1884. Herbert Spiegelberg writes, "While outward religious practice never entered his life any more than it did that of most academic scholars of
36278-412: The writings of Bernard Bolzano , Hermann Lotze , J. Stuart Mill , and David Hume . Husserl was so impressed by Brentano that he decided to dedicate his life to philosophy; indeed, Franz Brentano is often credited as being his most important influence, e.g., with regard to intentionality . Following academic advice, two years later in 1886 Husserl followed Carl Stumpf , a former student of Brentano, to
36472-410: Was an Austrian-German philosopher and mathematician who established the school of phenomenology . In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality . In his mature work, he sought to develop a systematic foundational science based on the so-called phenomenological reduction . Arguing that transcendental consciousness sets
36666-865: Was born in 1859 in Proßnitz in the Margraviate of Moravia in the Austrian Empire (today Prostějov in the Czech Republic ). He was born into a Jewish family, the second of four children. His father was a milliner . His childhood was spent in Prostějov, where he attended the secular primary school. Then Husserl traveled to Vienna to study at the Realgymnasium there, followed next by the Staatsgymnasium in Olmütz . At
36860-549: Was born, in 1893 their son Gerhart , and in 1894 their son Wolfgang. Elizabeth would marry in 1922, and Gerhart in 1923; Wolfgang, however, became a casualty of the First World War . Gerhart would become a philosopher of law, contributing to the subject of comparative law , teaching in the United States and after the war in Austria . Following his marriage Husserl began his long teaching career in philosophy. He started in 1887 as
37054-619: Was needed. An ontological catalogue is an attempt to list the fundamental constituents of reality. The question of whether or not existence is a predicate has been discussed since the Early Modern period, not least in relation to the ontological argument for the existence of God . Existence, that something is, has been contrasted with essence , the question of what something is. Since existence without essence seems blank, it associated with nothingness by philosophers such as Hegel. Nihilism represents an extremely negative view of being,
37248-433: Was never fully endorsed by Niels Bohr , was denounced as mystical and anti-scientific by Albert Einstein . Pauli accepted the term, and described quantum mechanics as lucid mysticism . Edmund Husserl Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl ( / ˈ h ʊ s ɜːr l / HUUSS -url ; US also / ˈ h ʊ s ər əl / HUUSS -ər-əl , German: [ˈɛtmʊnt ˈhʊsɐl] ; 8 April 1859 – 27 April 1938 )
37442-667: Was subject. One argument against Husserl's description works this way: instead of infinity and the Deity being the ego's gateway to the Other, as in Descartes, Husserl's ego in the Cartesian Meditations itself becomes transcendent. It remains, however, alone (unconnected). Only the ego's grasp "by analogy" of the Other (e.g., by conjectural reciprocity) allows the possibility for an 'objective' intersubjectivity, and hence for community. In 1933,
37636-586: Was the result of a suggested censorship by Heidegger's publisher who feared that the book might otherwise be banned by the Nazi regime. The dedication can still be found in a footnote on page 38, thanking Husserl for his guidance and generosity. Husserl had died three years earlier. In post-war editions of Sein und Zeit the dedication to Husserl is restored. The complex, troubled, and sundered philosophical relationship between Husserl and Heidegger has been widely discussed. On 4 May 1933, Professor Edmund Husserl addressed
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