Abstract

"In my view, the true significance of Gottlob Frege's logical and mathematical investigations has not yet been appreciated, much less fully treated." ;Husserl the phenomenologist moved as far from his early views in the Logical Investigations as young Heidegger the reviewer was to move from his first happy praise of Frege. This is true, at least, regarding reference, and reference is my main concern here. I will argue that Husserl's early views on reference have not yet been appreciated, much less fully treated. The theory of reference, even in its recent attenuated form, has typically been taken to exclude matters of intentionality. When intentionality is applied to problems of reference, and even when one is careful to specify the bounds of extensionality, the result appears unavoidably intensional: one is saddled with meanings, contents, possible worlds, reinterpreted quantifiers, or other nonextensional entities and devices. It should therefore come as a surprise that one prominent champion of intentionality, Edmund Husserl, once advocated an extensional approach to reference. This he did in the first edition of his Logical Investigations. I will examine Husserl's early views against classical tests for extensionality. Husserl's extensional view is of historical interest, for it supplements the work on Husserl's later intensional view of reference, as described by Follesdal and others. It also holds the promise of retrieving intentionality from the clutches of intensionality