The critique to psychological hypostasis of the universal in John Locke's theory of abstraction in Edmund Husserl's Second Logical Investigation

Abstract

This work aims to explain the criticism of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) to the empiricism of John Locke (1632 -1704) circumscribed in the Second Logical Investigation in the work Logical Investigations (1901). In this way, we will detail the questions referring to the psychological hypostasis of the general defended by John Locke, which arises due to the affirmation of the non-existence in reality of something like a universal, but that only individual things exist and are ordered in species and genera with respect to the similarities. In this way, the appearances of things are seen as "complexes of (simple) ideas", and the fact that we can name many things solely by means of one and the same general name proves that a general meaning, a "general idea", must correspond to In this article, we will discuss how abstraction, for Husserl, is not what we perceive only through sensation data, as sensualist empiricism wants us to believe, but essences and essence connections. In short, for phenomenology, there is no opposition between essentiality (Wesenheit) and being-given (Gegebensein) to the “essences” that are perceived in the “things themselves” without resorting to a psychological artífice