Quod implicat: A semantic approach to Husserl's logic

The dissertation attempts to address a problem connected with Husserl's method of providing an axiomatic foundation for the laws of logic. Specifically, the method in question derives categoriel concepts by means of a process called 'ideating abstraction'. On the basis of this procedure, the axioms or principles in question are established by making intuitively present or 'seeing' the compatibility of a set of categories. The problem arises from Husserl's requirement that the denial or negation of any axiom so derived must be excluded or shown to be illegitimate. Husserl's claim is that this can be achieved by establishing not a lack of compatibility but rather a 'relationship of conflict' between those categories as an intuitively given phenomenon. This claim is rejected as impracticable. In its place, a non-demonstrative form of reductio ad absurdum argument as advanced by Gilbert Ryle is suggested that does not violate Husserl's strictures against both construction and deductive proof as inappropriate methods of philosophical reasoning. After giving an account of Husserl's concept of logic in which his initial concern with formal-logical laws and their foundation in formal-ontological principles is shown to develop into a concern with material-logical laws and their corresponding material-ontological principles, the viability of this suggestion is tested on the example of Husserl's 'argument' for the axiom or principle of transcendental idealism. It is shown that this 'argument' depends in part upon reductio ad absurdum arguments against the axiom or principle underlying the 'thesis of the natural attitude'. On the basis of this account, a determination of the character of Husserl's transcendental idealism and method of phenomenological reduction is offered and several interpretive issues in the literature are addressed. These issues include: the question of a motivation for performing the phenomenological reduction; the putative difference between Husserl's concept of consciousness and Heidegger's Dasein; and the problem linguistic expression poses for the performance of the phenomenological reduction. The dissertation concludes by considering an objection to the reductio ad absurdum argument and by suggesting a wider scope for its employment in phenomenology.