Psychologism

2.1.4. Logical question (Logische Frage)

If Kant, reversing the tendency introduced by the logic of Port Royal, insists on the specificity of logic versus psychology, it will be Herbart who will give canonical form to this movement by becoming the paradigmatic defender of formal logic. German idealism in its development ends up promoting a non-subjectivist idealism that reaches its culmination in Hegel with its identification of being and thinking. Logische Frage is the name of the controversy unleashed by Trendelenburg (1843) against Herbartians and Hegelians, that is, both against the idea of a purely formal logic, and against the identification of logic and metaphysics.

The logische Frage is not identical with the Psychologismusstreit, but both processes are linked in several ways. One of the derivations of the logische Frage is the emergence and consolidation of a strong ‘immanentist’ tendency (Sigwart, 1873–8 [1904]: 6–7; Wundt, 1893: I, 12; Lipps, 1893: 1–3; Erdmann, 1892: 35, 187) that, trying to release logic from metaphysics, ends up interpreting its laws as ‘laws of thought’ (Denkgesetze) and not of being. It is this immanentist tendency that, on the one hand, promotes in Germany the foundation of logic in psychology in the 1880s, on the other, links this foundation in an essential way to a relativism of the species (Sigwart, 1873–8 [1904]: I, 8; Erdmann, 1892: 378; Husserl, 1900 [1975]: 130ff.).