Dasein - Monoskop

12 PART II
Investigations. 5 The second phase is that of the Logical Investigations
themselves (and of related writings), a period when Husserl
did not yet explicitly employ the method of phenomenological reductions.
Finally, the third—and longest—phase is that of transcendental
phenomenology, starting around 1905, and ending with Husserl's
death in 1938. Of course, within each of these three phases further
distinctions could easily be made. However, since I am not primarily
interested in Husserl's detailed intellectual biography, questions of
development will be discussed only occasionally, and only as far as
the major changes are concerned. One development will stand out
clearly, in any case: although Husserl believed in the central tenets
of the conception of language as calculus throughout his career as a
philosopher, he spelled out the implications of this view with respect
to an increasing range of issues.
2. FORMALISM—THREAT AND TEMPTATION
—THE EMERGENCE OF LANGUAGE AS CALCULUS
IN THE EARLY WRITINGS
In this chapter I shall try to show how the central tenets of the conception
of language as calculus emerge in those writings of Husserl's
that precede the Logical Investigations which were published in
1900/01 and which he worked on since 1895 or so. 6 We shall thus
be dealing here with the period from the Habilitationsschrift On the
Concept of Number (1887) 7 to the manuscript "Intentional Objects"
(1894/98). 8
The central challenge for any interpretation of this period is to
explain, and to make intelligible, Husserl's development. This development
led him from his early psychological investigations into
the generation of the concepts of different cardinal numbers (Anzahlen)1
to his much broader subsequent interests in logic as an ideal
science and in language, grammar, mereology, perception, intentionally
and truth, interests that appear around the mid-nineties. How
many stages can be distinguished between 1887 and 1895, which
problems caused the transitions from one stage to the next, and why
did specific new subjects and interests make an appearance at spe-