ABSTRACT
Our last Investigation may have seemed at first to lose itself in remote questions of descriptive psychology: it has, however, been of considerable help in our attempted elucidation of knowledge. All thought, and in particular all theoretical thought and knowledge, is carried on by way of certain ‘acts’, which occur in a context of expressive discourse. In these acts lies the source of all those unities-of-validity which confront the thinker as objects of thought and knowledge, or as the explanatory grounds and principles, the theories or sciences of the latter. In these acts, therefore, lies the source, also, of the pure, universal Ideas connected with such objects, whose ideally governed combinations pure logic attempts to set forth, and whose elucidation is the supreme aim of epistemological criticism. Plainly we shall have gone far in our elucidation of knowledge, once we have established the phenomenological peculiarities of acts as such, that much debated, little understood class of experiences. By putting our logical experiences into this class, we shall have taken an important step towards the demarcation of an analysis which will ‘make sense’ of the logical sphere and of the fundamental concepts which concern knowledge. In the course of our Investigation we were led to distinguish various concepts of content which tend to become confusedly mixed up whenever acts, and the ideal unities pertaining to acts, are in question. Differences which had already struck us in our First Investigation, in the narrower context of meanings and of acts conferring meaning, appeared once more in a wider context and in the most general forms. Even the highly noteworthy notion of content, that of ‘intentional essence’, which emerged as a novel gain from our last Investigation, was not without this relation to the logical sphere: for the same series of identities, previously employed to illustrate the unity of meaning, now yielded, suitably generalized, a certain identity, that of ‘intentional essence’, which applied to all acts whatsoever. By thus linking up, or subordinating, the ideal unities and phenomenological characters of the logical realm, to the quite general characters and unities of the sphere of acts, we importantly deepened our phenomenological and critical understanding of the former.
