FROM KAN T TO H USSER L FROM KAN T TO H USSER L SELECTED ESSAYS Charles Parsons HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2012 Copyright © 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Parsons, Charles, 1933– From Kant to Husserl : selected essays / Charles Parsons. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 04853- 9 (alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, German— 18th century. 2. Philosophy, German— 19th century. 3. Philosophy, German— 20th century. 4. Philosophy, Modern. 5. Kant, Immanuel, 1724– 1804. 6. Frege, Gottlob, 1848– 1925. I. Title. B2741.P37 2012 193—dc23 2011030877 For Jotham and Sylvia CONTENTS Preface ix Part I: Kant Note to Part I 3 1 The Transcendental Aesthetic 5 2 Arithmetic and the Categories 42 3 Remarks on Pure Natural Science 69 4 Two Studies in the Reception of Kant’s Philosophy of Arithmetic 80 Postscript to Part I 100 Part II: Frege and Phenomenology 5 Some Remarks on Frege’s Conception of Extension 117 Postscript to Essay 5 131 6 Frege’s Correspondence 138 Postscript to Essay 6 158 7 Brentano on Judgment and Truth 161 8 Husserl and the Linguistic Turn 190 Bibliography 217 Copyright Ac know ledg ments 231 Index 233 PREFACE The present volume is the fi rst of two volumes collecting most of my essays on other phi los o phers, excluding those already reprinted some years ago in Mathematics in Philosophy. The rough division of the vol- umes is between essays on pre-t wentieth- century and on later authors. Thus the projected second volume will be titled Philosophy of Mathe- matics in the Twentieth Century. The essays in the present volume are on the whole less focused on philosophy of mathematics than those in the projected second volume. Frege and Brentano are reasonably thought of as nineteenth-c entury fi gures, although they were intellectually active into the twentieth cen- tury, and some of their late work is discussed in these essays. Husserl is certainly a twentieth-c entury fi gure, and the work discussed in Essay 8 was all at least published in that century and mostly written then. But it seemed more appropriate to group that essay with those on Frege and Brentano, the more so since it is not at all about philosophy of mathematics. Of the Kantian essays, Essays 1, 2, and 4 grew out of my earlier work on Kant’s philosophy of arithmetic. However, Essay 1 is a general commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic and does not attempt to present an interpretation of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics. It is well known that much of the latter is to be found in other, rather scattered, writings of Kant. Essay 1 is the only place where I have at- tempted to say something substantial about the distinction between appearances and things in themselves, but it limits its focus to the Aesthetic and so does not purport to be a full treatment of that theme even in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is an issue that I have always found diffi cult, and I am sympathetic to the view expressed by Allen Wood that it is not possible to resolve the main disputes on the basis of ix