ABSTRACT
The more precise analysis of these concepts of presentation or the experiences they comprise, and the final determination of their mutual relations, will be a task for further phenomenological investigations. Here we shall only try to add some further equivocations to those affecting the term under discussion. To keep them sharply apart is of fundamental importance in our logical and epistemological endeavours. The phenomenological analyses
indispensably needed to resolve these equivocations, have only been partially encountered in our previous expositions. What is missing has, however, often been touched upon, and indicated to an extent that makes a brief list of headings possible. We therefore continue our enumeration as follows:
5. Presentation is often opposed to mere thinking. The same difference is then operative that we also call the difference between intuition and concept. Of an ellipsoid I have a presentation, though not of a surface of Kummer: through suitable drawings, models or theoretically guided flights of fancy I can also achieve a presentation of the latter. A round square, a regular icosahedron1 and similar a priori impossibilia are in this sense ‘unpresentable’. The same holds of a completely demarcated piece of a Euclidean manifold of more than three dimensions, of the number π, and of other constructs quite free from contradiction. In all these cases of non-presentability ‘mere concepts’ are given to us: more precisely, we have nominal expressions inspired by significant intentions in which the objects of our reference are ‘thought’ more or less indefinitely, and particularly in the indefinite attributive form of an A as the mere bearer of definitely named attributes. To mere thinking ‘presentation’ is opposed: plainly this means the intuition which gives fulfilment, and adequate fulfilment, to the mere meaning-intention. The new class of cases is favoured because in it ‘corresponding intuitions’ are added member by member and from all sides to thought-presentations – whether these are purely symbolic meaning-intentions or fragmentarily and inadequately mixed with intuitions – presentations which leave our deepest cognitive cravings unsatisfied. What we intuit stands before our eyes in perception or imagination just as we intended it in our thought. To present something to oneself means therefore to achieve a corresponding intuition of what one merely thought of or what one meant but only at best very inadequately intuited.
