Instructions

Note: this assignment is for students in Group I only.

The assignment is due, as an attachment, via the “Assignments” tool on eCommons, by midnight Thursday, November 5 (in PDF or any format easily converted to PDF, e.g. MSWord, LATEX, RTF, plain text).

Please respond to the following question in approximately two pages (double spaced). (Needless to say this should be your own original work.)

In §142 (p. 341), Husserl says that “Of essential necessity [prinzipiell] … to every truly existing object there corresponds the idea of a possible consciousness in which the object itself is seized upon originarily and therefore in a perfectly adequate way.” This repeats the doctrine we saw already in the Logical Investigations, that the “truth” of a meaning-state refers to its possible fulﬁllment (by an intuition “adequate” to its meaning).

As Husserl goes on to point out at the beginning of §143, however (p. 342), this appears to contradict what he said earlier (in §138), namely that — also “of essential necessity” — “something physically real [ein Dingreales] … appears only ‘inadequately’ ” (p. 331). How does Husserl resolve this contradiction? What are we intending when we regard, for example, a judgment about Dinge (such as: “A blackbird is ﬂying outside the window”) as true?