Husserl’s Conception of Physical Theories and Physical Geometry in the Time of the Prolegomena: A Comparison with Duhem’s and Poincaré’s Views

摘要

This paper discusses Husserl’s views on physical theories in the first volume of his Logical Investigations, and compares them with those of his contemporaries Pierre Duhem and Henri Poincaré. Poincaré’s views serve as a bridge to a discussion of Husserl’s almost unknown views on physical geometry from about 1890 on, which in comparison even with Poincaré’s—not to say Frege’s—or almost any other philosopher of his time, represented a rupture with the philosophical tradition and were much more in tune with the physical geometry underlying the Einstein-Hilbert general theory of relativity developed more than two decades later.