The Identity Crisis of Philosophy and Subjectivity: Edmund Husserl, Ernst Cassirer and Bertrand Russell (Rudolf Carnap)

• Grant number: 25/03041-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: May 01, 2025
• End date: April 30, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Mário Ariel González Porta
• Grantee: Brenda Cardoso Soares
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Comunicação, Letras e Artes. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 24/04618-3 - The Crisis of Philosophy in the 1930's, AP.R

Abstract

The problem of the identity of philosophy revolves around the relationship between philosophy and science. Edmund Husserl, Ernst Cassirer and Rudolf Carnap are representatives of philosophical currents that offer different proposals to this problem, each in their own way providing new terms for this relationship. The aim of this project is to explore their respective proposals, taking psychology and the role of subjectivity as a guiding thread. To do so, we will use as a reference some of their main works: Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences (1936), Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-29), and some aspects of the passage from Russell's Principles (1913) to Carnap's Aufbau (1928) in dialogues with the previous ones, which will be detailed later.On the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a distancing between intuition and science, a phenomenon that was usually emphasized in the mathematics and physics scenarios. To equalize the investigation of external and internal experiences, scientific advances also transformed the study of subjectivity. The naturalization of psychology signaled the culmination of the loss of space for philosophy and its once necessary role in grounding all experiences and, consequently, science in general. Husserl's oeuvre demonstrates an overarching effort to establish philosophy as the foundational science for all other disciplines. As his phenomenology matured and his concept of the transcendental reduction became more sophisticated, the significance of a rigorous study of subjectivity for the philosopher became increasingly apparent. Consequently, it is unsurprising that in 1935, the author posits that the crux of the crisis in science lies in psychology, despite not claiming that it was there that it originated.While Husserlian phenomenology endeavors to reestablish a connection with intuition through a "return to things themselves", Cassirer underscores the intuitive distance. Notably, his neo-Kantian predecessors had already established philosophy as a reflection on science. Cassirer's distinctive approach lies in delineating science as one among several potential symbolic forms, thereby rendering symbolic mediation valid for both the scientific perspective and the configuration of the natural worldview. One major objective of this study is to emphasize the convergence and the difference of the two philosophers "solution" to the crisis and how this leads a two different approaches on the relation between psychology and philosophy. The investigation will proceed by examining the influence of the debate between Cassirer and Bertrand Russell in the further development of analytical philosophy. Despite their differences in resolution, Husserl and Cassirer are united in their maintenance of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. This consonance is in opposition to the development of analytic philosophy. In the evolution of his thought, Husserl radicalizes his views and recognizes the insufficiency of descriptive psychology in overcoming psychologism, which can be surmounted through the transcendental reduction of subjectivity. In contrast, analytic philosophy adopts a divergent approach. Since its early stages, with Frege, analytic philosophy tends to exclude subjective perspectives, replacing them with logical analyses of scientific language. This tendency experiences an important maturation in the polemic between Cassirer and Russell. Cassirer gained prominence by opposing the two extremes of Husserlian "subjectivism" and Russellian "objectivism". The latter sought to explicit achieve a logical reconstruction of arithmetic that eliminated subjectivity and, so, had a direct and decisive influence on Carnap's Aufbau (1928) program. In summary, the aim of the project is to concentrate on the issue of the identity crisis of philosophy in the context of the relationship between philosophy and subjectivity.