A Study Of Husserl’s Categorical Intuition In The Time Of Logical Investigations

My thesis attempts to explore the issue of categorical intuition that Husserl came up with in the period of Logical Investigations, which refers to the time from the 1893/1894 manuscripts of Preliminary Studies of Logical Investigations to 1913 the second edition of Logical Investigations. Husserl dealt with the most crucial problem of the logic and its foundation in Logical Investigations that issued in his divergence from the pyschologism in the late 19th century. With regard to this, categorical intuition becomes a decisive step of logic breaks through to phenomenology. As it is, categorical intuition locates in the centre of Husserl’s philosophical logical program in Logical Investigations with two aspects:first, it comes to the accomplishment of the core task of pure logic; and second in terms of "evidence" as the definitive attempts of the phenomenological epistemology. Therefore this thesis counts categorical intuition not merely as a divergence from intuitional problems; nevertheless it keeps to ’a breakthrough to phenomenology’ and correspondingly considers categorical intuition as the intermediate of ’intuition’ and ’categories’.Chapter 1 inquires the psychological origins of the concept ’categorical intuition’. I will try to detect the positive significance of Husserl’s critiques on Brentano’s ’double judgment’ in Preliminary Studies of Logical Investigations (Husserliana XL), and it leads me to such conclusions:The first is, in terms of the bifurcation in the theory of judgment with his mentor, Husserl came up with the concept of ’state of affairs’(Sachverhalt), which was the foremost attempt to the pure logical categories. The second is the divergence in the theory of presentation shows that Husserl had noticed the difference between ’intuition’ and ’representation’, and invented a theory of transcendent presentation. Both of the two aspects of this study provide possibilities for the ’categorical intuition’.Chapter 2 attempts to illustrate the constitutional role of ’states of affairs’ in Husserl’s pure logical categories. I will try to first extract the dilemma in previous theories of category, which mainly refer to Aristotle’s ontological categories and Kant’s epistemological categories. And I will then demonstrate that Husserl revives Aristotle’s categories in reality by which he introduces transcendent presentation that reveals ’state of affairs’, because his innovative concept ’state of affairs’ is the real basis of pure logical categories, which goes beyond his counterpart Kant. Here also indicates the presentation of state of affairs extends to the ’categorical intuition’ in the next Chapter.Chapter 3 initials a quite significant discussion of how categorical intuition can be a breakthrough of the pure logic to phenomenology. I will here first differentiate categorical intuition and sensuous intuition under the fulfillment-scheme in Logical Investigations, and then elucidate sensuous intuition lays ground for categorical intuition. Furthermore, I will observe two species of categorical intuition, that is formal synthesized categorical intuition and the universal intuition. The former displays the ’sense’ on the case of the adequacy of the particular truth to the state of affairs and the latter extracts the general categorical essences by which reveals state of affairs on the different stage, both of which dwell in Husserl’s innovative concept the state of affairs. At last, I will illustrate "evidence" corresponding to several senses of state of affairs and the predicament in categorical representation with a positive view.