Husserl and Twardowski: Two Paths for the Reform of Logic

Abstract

This paper reconstructs, in a historical and critical perspective, the Brentanian project of a reform of logic and the bifurcation that emerges between Twardowski and Husserl. Against the widespread tendency to frame the Austro-Polish debates through the metaphysical opposition realism/idealism, it argues that the decisive issue concerns the constitution and scope of a formally sound yet epistemologically relevant logic. Building on Brentano's reduction of judgment to existential acceptance or rejection, the paper highlights how "modification" becomes the operator through which predicative judgments are transformed into existential form. It then examines Twardowski's theory of logical modification—grounded in the distinction between attributive and modifying adjectives and in the thesis that representation does not posit existence—and shows how this framework motivates his account of intentional (in-)existence and his stance on general objects. Husserl's critique, by contrast, relocates modification within a phenomenological theory of meaning and intentionality: nominalization, suppositio materialis, and especially neutralization articulate a layered system of logical and intentional modifications. The paper concludes that Husserl's reform opens a systematic place for modalizations (possibility, necessity, probability) as constitutive features of meaning and noematic content.