sition. When Husserl moved to Halle as a Dozent, his colleague Cantor
introduced him to Bolzano’s logic and made him sympathetic to the program
of transfinite numbers and set theory (Tragesser, 1984: 6; Mohanty, 1982).
Husserl came onto the scene in the midst of the foundational controversy in
mathematics and was personally connected to most of the dramatis personae.
Weierstrass had been the leading rigorist since the 1860s; Kronecker was the
leading critic of apparent absurdities arising from the new axiomatic and set-
theoretical methods; he was a bitter enemy of Cantor, who felt that Kronecker’s
persecution was destroying his career, and an opponent of Weierstrass, as chief
promulgator of insidious methods. Cross-pressured by his conflicting contacts,
Husserl established his own position in the early 1900s, contemporaneous with
the rival foundational programs in mathematics: Russell’s derivation of mathe-
matics from logic in 1903–1910, Hilbert’s formalism announced in 1904, and
Brouwer’s intuitionism in 1907. Husserl was Hilbert’s colleague at Göttingen
during 1901–1916 when the issue surfaced.^35 His own views moved away from
Hilbert’s radical conventionalism in a direction that got them taken seriously
by the intuitionists in their concern to justify intuitions of mathematical prac-
tice which are deeper than artificial rules of logic.
Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900), growing out of the logicist camp,
broadens beyond mathematics the search for secure foundations. His ambition
was to provide foundations for all science and philosophy, to make philosophy
itself a “rigorous science,” in the title of his 1911 paper. Husserl was a hybrid
between the mathematical lineages and Brentano’s school. His added ingredient
was Brentano’s doctrine of the intentionality of consciousness, but interpreted
in an anti-psychological fashion, moving away from the naturalism which
Brentano had championed in opposition to Neo-Kantian Idealism. Brentano
had ridden to fame with the movement to establish an empirical research
discipline in psychology. His version of psychological imperialism had pro-
posed to induce the laws of logic. Now this ran head-on into the movement
of mathematical foundationalists, for whom logic was no longer an archaic
discipline, a soft spot in the philosophical curriculum, but an arena of vigorous
exploration in its own right. The split between psychological and anti-psycho-
logical approaches, manifested in Husserl’s personal network—Brentano never
forgave him for converting to the enemy’s position—became explicit as onto-
logical levels in Husserl’s philosophy: on one side the natural attitude of the
empirical ego; on the other the realm of essences, revealed by bracketing
questions of the existence of objects. Husserl creates a new philosophical
position by incorporating the defining ideas of his immediate networks into
the contents of his own philosophy, turning conflicting doctrines into a hier-
archy of levels of analysis—a Durkheimian reflection of social structure in the
contents of ideas.
738 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths