Husserl’s logic of fitness

At the beginning of Formal and Transcendental Logic, Edmund Husserl characterizes the discipline of formal logic according to a threefold signification of the Greek term logos. Husserl locates the study of consistency with mathematical logic and distinguishes it from the Aristotelian apophantic tradition according to different kinds of formalization. In Husserl’s philosophical project generally speaking, this evidence is found in the fulfilling intention of a truthful premise. Husserl’s distinction between the logic of consistency and the logic of truth parallels the standard distinction between validity and soundness. Husserl’s mature development of transcendental logic–a phenomenological science concerned with the universal and necessary features of intentionality–that the correlative notions of formal ontology and formal logic are realized and obtain a common grounding with formal apophantics. Husserl’s logic of fitness opens a critical space in which multi-level habitat organizations can be identified and clarified in a way that makes ecologically emergent properties intelligible.