ABSTRACT
The transfer of the analogical device ‘proper/improper’ from metaphysics to psychology, from psychology to epistemology, from epistemology to ethics and logic, has always been successful. In the winter semester lecture courses of 1884–1885 in Vienna, Franz Brentano gave—in Edmund Husserl’s presence—a new psychological application of the distinction, originally ontological, of the proper and the improper. Husserl maintains that while being employed within the algorithms of a calculus, related and combined with other number-signs, number-signs never cease to refer to number-manifolds. It would be easy to show that Martin Heidegger conveniently simplifies the situation in attributing Husserl’s philosophical awakening to his reading of Brentano’s Psychology. What Husserl calls a “proper representation of a manifold”, which may be described in mereological terms as a whole whose parts are merely collectively bound together. Husserl replaces the key notions of ‘construction’, ‘derivation’, and ‘reduction’ with those of ‘transformation’ and ‘variation’—which clearly anticipate Husserl’s later concept of ‘variation’.
