Mally's Determinates and Husserl's Noemata
Author
Edward N. Zalta
Reference
Ernst Mally - Versuch einer Neubewertung, A.~Hieke (ed.),
St. Augustin: Academia-Verlag, 1998, pp. 9-28
Abstract
In this paper, the author compares passages from two philosophically
important texts and concludes that they have fundamental ideas in
common. What makes this comparison and conclusion interesting is that
the texts come from two different traditions in philosophy, the
analytic and the phenomenological. In 1912, Ernst Mally published
Gegenstandstheoretische Grundlagen der Logik und Logistik, an
analytic work containing a combination of formal logic and
metaphysics. In 1913, Edmund Husserl published Ideen zu einer
reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen
Philosophie, a seminal work in phenomenology in which
noemata are defined and given a crucial role in directing our
mental states. In the passages from these two texts reproduced below,
the author shows that the abstract `determinates' postulated by Mally
in 1912 are assigned much the same role that Husserl assigned to
noemata in 1913. Though Mally's determinates are not as highly
structured as Husserl's noemata, they have a feature that explains how
they manage to play the role assigned to them. The corresponding
feature is missing, or at least, not emphasized in Husserl's account
of noemata. Therefore, insights from both philosophers, and thus from
both the analytic and phenomenological traditions, are needed to give
a more complete account of directed mental states.
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