Dummett writes,

"Frege was the grandfather of analytical philosophy, Husserl the founder of the phenomenological school, two radically different philosophical movements. In 1903, say, how would they have appeared to any German student of philosophy who knew the work of both? Not, certainly, as two deeply opposed thinkers: rather as remarkably close in orientation, despite some divergence of interests. They may be compared with the Rhine and the Danube, which rise quite close to one another and for a time pursue roughly parallel courses, only to diverge in utterly different directions and flow into different seas. Why, then, did this happen? What small ingredient into the thought of each was eventually magnified into so great an effect?" (p. 26)

The immediate aim of this book (a revised version of a series of lectures originally published in Lingua e Stile 23 (1988), pp. 3-49, 171-210) is to lay a foundation for answering these last two questions. Dummett avows the further aim of helping to repair the rift that yawns between the analytic and Continental traditions. Yet this is not, and does not purport to be, a work in the history of philosophy. For one, the author does not aspire to comprehensiveness, ignoring such figures as Russell and Moore on the ground that their contribution to the analytic tradition has already been well documented. Second, there is little attempt to trace causal connections among philosophers or within an individual philosopher's development. Instead Dummett will trace what he terms the history of thought rather than of thinkers.

Making no pretence to neutrality as between the analytic and Continental traditions, Dummett primarily speaks from the former point of view. He characterizes analytic philosophy as adhering to two principles: (1) That a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language, and (2) That a comprehensive account of thought can only be so attained (p. 4). Such a formulation is notoriously ambiguous, and the above two theses should be rewritten as four, in the first two of which 'thought' is replaced by 'propositions', while in the last two of which 'thought' is replaced by 'intentional states'.

Thus disambiguated Dummett contends (Chapter Two) that Frege was an ambivalent analytic philosopher, taking language to be at best a fallible guide- -but our only guide--to the nature of propositions. (Lacking interest in the question, Frege is apparently innocent of failing to explain intentional states in linguistic terms.) After repudiating the psychologism he espoused in Philosophie der Arithmetik, so was Husserl, who joined Bolzano, Brentano, Frege and Meinong in insisting upon the mind-independence of propositions. However, unlike Frege, Husserl sought a characterization of intentional states, and not just their objects; further, he sought an account of the relation between intentional state and object that would apply to all such states, be they attitudes towards propositions or not. For this purpose Husserl fashioned the notion of noema to serve as a constituent of all intentional states, serving, according to Dummett, as a mode of presentation of their objects. Following Follesdal, Dummett argues (Chapters Eight and Eleven) that Husserl's concept of a noema is a generalization of Frege's notion of sense. But in thus generalizing this notion Husserl was precluded from taking language as his guide. For noemata involved in, for instance, perceptual states need not be the content of any sentence, so if we are to study them it is not through the medium of language. Rather we must resort to the famous phenomenological reduction and introspect upon the structure of intentional states themselves.

Dummett contends that by virtue of generalizing Frege's notion of sense to arrive at that of the neoma Husserl broke decisively with the tradition that was to become analytic philosophy. It must also be contended, then, that Husserl's use of the notion of neoma accounts for his undertaking, after repudiating naturalism in the period between 1905 and 1906, to construct a first philosophy that would undergird not just psychology but all of natural science. The eidetic reduction, the epoche, the process of bracketing for the sake of focusing just on the intentional state itself, are all part of this foundational enterprise, and Dummett is committed to showing that these features can in large part be accounted for in terms of Husserl's generalization of the concept of sense. Dummett does not discharge this burden in the present book, nor is it clear that it is possible to do so.

For such a thing to be possible it would have to be that if only Husserl had not generalized the notion of sense to apply to states that are not linguistic in any straightforward way (or if only Frege had), then he and Frege would throughout their careers have been fellow-laborers with largely similar interests and aims. Yet Husserl's enormous debt to Brentano, only partly documented by Dummett in Chapter Five, makes this unlikely. Brentano famously distinguished between mental and physical phenomena, but the examples he gives of the latter are not rocks and chairs but, "...a color, a shape, a panorama which I see; a chord which I hear; warmth, cold, an odor which I experience; and also similar images which appear in the imagination." What would now be construed as physical phenomena play no role in Brentano's early thought, which bears the marks of a radical empiricism. But Brentano also sought an "ideal intuition" (ideale Anschauung) that would yield a connected system of apodictic and a priori truths, and for him such intuitions were to be found in self-knowledge. Husserl was an heir to this approach, and hoped to extend it further by showing that it could provide an epistemological foundation for all science, thereby accounting for the possibility of objective knowledge. Frege, on the other hand, while postulating mind-independent propositions to explain the possibility of communication, has no aim to locate an indubitable source from which all knowledge flows. I see no evidence that if only he had widened the notion of sense to that of a mode of presentation involved in all intentional states then he would have had this aim.

In spite of my scepticism of the book's ostensible goal and the central thesis that is supposed to further it, we should be grateful that Dummett has attempted to examine the genesis of the fissure between philosophy's two major traditions. This will provoke others to undertake the inquiry as well. Further, the book contains valuable discussions of the relation between thought and language, and of Frege's and Husserl's views on perception. It also contains clarifications of Dummett's earlier accounts of the proper form for a theory of meaning. In addition there is an Appendix containing an interview with the author conducted by Joachim Schulte. There the author reflects upon his own philosophical development and on the nature of contemporary philosophy, and shares anecdotes concerning philosophy in Britain in recent decades.