Husserl’s Logic of Probability: An Attempt to Introduce in Philosophy the Concept of “Intensive” Possibility
Abstract
Husserl’s insisting reflections on the question of probability and the project of a logic of probability, although persisting throughout his work, published and unpublished, from the Prolegomena to later works (the Krisis), has not received any serious attention. While exposing the main lines of his project, this article aims at listing some of the reasons explaining this paradoxical situation. 1) The logic of probability is not conceived by Husserl as an extension of formal logic and especially of an already made logic, but as a reform of logic (from the recensions of Schröder to Formal and Transcendental Logic, and beyond). 2) This entails a revised notion of proposition, enlarged to every forms of “positions” or “thesis” and, extended, following the correlation of intentionality, to the noematic side. 3) The very notion of the “possible” at the basis of any logical, algebraic, arithmetic and geometric treatments of probability is enlarged and modified accordingly. 4) As a consequence, his position is rather singular and very hard to locate in the battle field among mathematicians, logicians and philosophers around the question of “foundation of probability” and the interpretation of probability calculus (a priori probability vs a posteriori probability, subjective vs objective probability, logical vs psychological probability, etc.).
Keywords: possibility, modality, range, logic, von Kries
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