Phenomenology and the modalities

pp. 168-179

in: Mohanty, Logic, truth and the modalities, Berlin, Springer, 1999

Abstract

My investigations into the nature of the modalities in Husserl's philosophy were first undertaken under the influence of the pioneering work of Jaakko Hintikka. I looked into the nature of Husserl's various concepts of possibility¹, and subjected the possible-worlds interpretation of Husserl to the criticism that it involved a naive ontological reification.² Hintikka and Harvey³, in response to my criticisms, and Seebohm on his own, have supplemented the possible world theory with an account culled from Husserl's writings — of the constitutive processes of modalization, thereby introducing the needed genetic underpinning, unavoidable from the phenomenological point of view, for the static-descriptive account of the earlier work (of Hintikka). All these have set the framework for study of the other modalities in phenomenology. In this paper, I will retrace some of the steps taken earlier, with regard to "possibility'.