became sufficiently generalized, some mathematicians flowed into philosophy,
meshing with philosophical disputes and initiating the several prongs of twen-
tieth-century philosophy. Ordinary language philosophy was a reaction of
traditional philosophers against this invasion of their base. It remained sophis-
ticated rather than banal because the formalists were implicitly present as a
foil; the tension between the two became the “analytical” problem space.
From Mathematical Foundations Crisis to Husserl’s Phenomenology
Realignment in the early 1900s happened on all sides. As we return to pick up
the growth of the phenomenological movement, it is well to keep in mind that
its origins in the networks and issues of the turn of the century are much the
same as those of the logical positivists. The older network as a whole was
transforming itself, and the sharp conflict between the two sides did not emerge
until fairly late, as the attention space became organized around new lines of
opposition. Both movements grew from amalgamations between the leading
mathematicians of the foundational crisis and the Neo-Kantian lineage. Where
the ingredients differ is that the positivists added a third strand, the physicists’
methodological dispute centered around Mach, whereas the phenomenologists
were tied instead to the movement of new experimental psychology in Bren-
tano’s branch. This is not to say that the intellectual ingredients remained
untransformed by these new combinations. Phenomenology began as a sharp
confrontation of psychological and anti-psychological positions, finding a com-
promise which shifted increasingly toward the anti-psychological side. Simi-
larly, phenomenology’s roots in mathematics became obliterated as the move-
ment later turned into intense opposition to the entire scientific worldview at
just the time when the logical positivists were making their most imperialist
claims. The paths of phenomenology and of positivism in the larger philosophi-
cal space are those of a growing polarization between extremes.
Husserl’s phenomenology popped up like a cork buffeted from all sides of
the mathematical-philosophical controversies of turn-of-the-century Germany.
He began at the heart of the mathematical establishment in Berlin, as a pupil
of Kronecker and assistant to Weierstrass. Husserl’s dissertation and first book
(1889) combined his teachers’ positions: Kronecker tried to reduce all of
mathematics to a foundation of the natural numbers, while Weierstrass led the
arithmetization of analysis. Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic generalizes the
issue and treats it with the psychological approach of Brentano, another of
Husserl’s teachers during his Wanderjahre through the German universities.
Frege had just published his masterwork (1884) eliminating psychologism from
logic; in a review Frege criticized Husserl’s work, resulting in correspondence
between them and the conversion of Husserl to Frege’s anti-psychological po-
The Post-revolutionary Condition^ •^737