UEBER ANSCHAUUNG UND IHRE PSYCHISCHE VERARBEITUNG. By B. Kerry.
DER FOLGERUNGSCALCUL UND DIE INHALTSLOGIK. By E. G. Husserl.
EXPERIMENTELLE PATHO-PSYCHOLOGIE. (Zweiter Artikel.) By M.
Dessoir.
R. Seydel regards sight alone as space-sense and the other senses as time-senses. This, he says, is the reason why there is no "naïve realism" for any other sense but sight.
S. Hansen, taking our concepts and sensations as the data from which we have to start, discusses the problem of the reality of the outer world. He arrives at the conclusion, that "if there is a thing in itself, the phenomenon is only one side of it, viz, that side which it reveals. The thing in itself is the real world in which we live and of which we speak in daily life, although we know it only through phenomena, i. e. our concepts."
Max Dessoir presents a review of Experimental Patho-psychology as it has developed in the last decades through the extraordinary attention bestowed upon the phenomena of hypnotism and kindred subjects. He discusses experimental patho-psychology with special reference to the great problems of (1) consciousness, (2) the relation between feeling and motion, (3) memory, and (4) personality. The two former points are discussed in the first article, the two latter in the conclusion. Max Dessoir emphasises in this essay again his theory of the double ego which he proposed in his pamphlet, Das Doppel-Ich.
B. Kerry's article is the conclusion of a series of essays on intuition (i. e. apprehension or sensation) and its psychical transformation. The author distinguishes between subjective concepts and objective concepts. If I think for instance of all the grapes that will grow this year in Italy, I do not know in my subjective conception their definite number. It is a definite number nevertheless. This concept is the objective concept. He devotes much space to a discussion of the rigidity of Kant's aprioristic judgment 7+5=12. The most important point is ultimately how this judgment possesses necessity. The author observes that the theorems of arithmetic possess necessity while we cannot attribute necessity to the results of calculation. Our faculty of calculation, B. Kerry says, should be considered as aprioristic, or more correctly, it is a complex of primitive faculties, and these are: "our faculty to apprehend in some contents of our apprehension something else which is designated afterwards as a concept derived from that contents; that is our faculty of forming abstracts. Further our faculty of comparison and at last our faculty of combining and separating. These faculties are aprioristic in the psychological sense of the word, which to-day is not recognised, in the sense of being innate." The whole article is written in a heavy style and in extra-Teutonic constructions with innumerable dashes containing parenthetical sentences and other bewildering explanations. We have after all not been able to discover how the judgment 7+5=12 possesses necessity.
E. G. Husserl criticises the position of several modern logicians, Boole, Venn, Peirce, and especially E. Schroeder, who published in the Göttinger Gelehrten Anzeigen an article on the Logical Calculus. Husserl says that "the logic of the logical calculus is in a wretched condition still. Its advocates have attained to clearness neither concerning the limits of this discipline nor its relation to deductive logic and to arithmetic. The logical considerations upon which the technique is built, are as a rule of such a kind that they cannot bear the most superficial criticism. And this calculus pretends to be a thoroughly reformed and the truly exact logic. It is natural that among the logicians the more scientific upon the whole keep aloof here. However the logical foundation of arithmetic is just as weak, yet this does not suffice to discard it. I believe that logical algebra in spite of its limited practical applicability should not be underrated, and that it should be of high interest to the logician for the sake of its actual merits." In the struggle between the logic of circumference and the logic of contents, Husserl maintains that a calculus of pure deductions can be constructed upon the basis of operations which are strictly without any contents. (Leipsic: O. R. Reisland.)
Κ.
PHILOSOPHISCHE MONATSHEFTE. Vol. XXVII. Nos. 5 and 6.