Such a process of analysis Bolzano called ‘ Auslegung ’...

Such a process of analysis Bolzano called ‘ Auslegung ’, involving the paraphrasing of the ordinary sentence into a sentence of a semi-formal canonical language that expresses its meaning completely and unambiguously. Here, too, we see a similarity to Russell’s idea of analysis (after 1905) as involving the transformation of ordinary sentences into sentences of a logically perfect language which mirror the reality they represent.

In the case of analyticity, Lapointe shows how Bolzano’s account made use of the method of substitution, which was later to play a role in the work of both Alfred Tarski (1901-83) and Quine - although neither was directly influenced by Bolzano. While Bolzano may have had no direct influence on the development of analytic philosophy, however, he did have an important influence on Husserl, as Lapointe notes in the final section of her paper.

Bolzano’s influence on Husserl is also mentioned by Dermot Moran in ‘Edmund Husserl’s Methodology of Concept Clarification’, Bolzano being seen as having inspired Husserl to investigate our knowledge of ideal objects such as numbers and universals (e.g. Redness). Traditional empiricism went wrong, according to Husserl, by failing to provide an adequate account of such knowledge, and one of the purposes of his new method of phenomenological analysis was to offer a better account.

Moran notes Husserl’s apparent agreement with the empiricist in claiming that “no concept can be thought without a foundation in a concrete intuition” (quoted on p. [5] below), and explains Husserl’s construal of knowledge as the ‘fulfilment of intuition’, but emphasizes that Husserl’s concern was to expand the range of what counts as ‘fulfilment’.

(As suggested above, it is instructive to compare Husserl’s views here with Russell’s early assumption that we can be ‘acquainted’ with universals and the role that the principle of acquaintance plays in Russell’s philosophy.) In his paper, Moran offers an account of the development of Husserl’s conception of phenomenological analysis from 1891, when his Philosophy of Arithmetic was published, to 1907, when Husserl started to see his philosophy as a new kind of transcendental philosophy.

From the very beginning, Moran argues, Husserl was concerned with identifying certain subjective conditions of objective cognition, which he came to call ‘phenomenological’ conditions, and distinguishing these from merely ‘psychological’ conditions.