Abstract

The present contribution elucidates Husserl’s relationship to Lotze in the light of Winthrop Bell’s notes on Husserl’s 1912 seminar on Lotze’s theory of knowledge. Once again, these notes make it clear that Husserl highly appreciated the chapter on Plato’s theory of ideas from Lotze’s 1874 Logic and his anti-psychologistic view of logic, as far as it goes. However, it also becomes clear that Husserl rejected both Lotze’s account of the origins of objectivity in terms of the doctrine of “achievements of thinking (Denkleistungen)” and the discussion of skepticism in the 1874 Logic against the background of his own (Bolzano-inspired) conception of intentionality and his treatment of the epistemological “problem of transcendence” in the framework of the “phenomenological reduction”.