Sorry for deserting you all. I've had a busy month, but now I'm ready to discuss LI 1. As I'm sure you all have noted, there's a lot in the first investigation to discuss. I think this is partly because it is really rich philosophically, and partly because of the zigzaging that Husserl mentions in the introduction (or was it the prolegomena?). Husserl constantly introduces new concepts without spending much time clarifying their place in his system or their essential features. So almost immediately we are faced with all of the primary themes of the Investigations: the structure of intentionality, parts and wholes, the theory of content, the theory of fulfillment, and of course, the subject of LI 1, the theory of expressions. One nice aspect of this is that the reader gets in view almost all of Husserl's (immense) project almost immediately, though how it all fits together is far from clear.
In LI 1 two areas really struck me. The first is Husserl's very clearly articulated internalism, and the second is his relation to Frege. I will deal with them in turn.
By Husserl's internalism I mean his claim that all meaningful acts, including expressions, gain their meaning from inner experiences. So though we can have an intuition (e.g. see) a meaningful gesture, the gesture is not meaningful in and of itself, but is an indication of an inner experience. Similarly, though we hear someone speaking, what makes that speech meaningful is the speaker's inner meaning giving act. I found this interesting because most of the philosophy that I've been influenced by (MP, MH) have rejected this idea. For them meaning is determined through external phenomena, either background social norms or bodily (depending on the type of meaning). Obviously there's a lot more to say about this, but not now.
Interlude: Husserl takes on a lot of Kantian terminology, doesn't he? Intuitions, judgments, etc. All from Kant.
Husserl's relation to Frege is the subject of a fair amount of scholarly work of which I have read very little of; however I am in the process of writing a paper on meaning in Frege so this is on my mind. In Uber Sinn und Bedeutung, which is usually translated as On Sense and Reference, Frege makes a distinction between the sense of a proper name and it's reference. Broadly speaking this can be thought of as the distinction between what a word means and what it picks out in the world; though Husserl rejects the terminological distinction (both obviously have the same meaning auf Deutsch), he accepts the gist of the philosophical distinction (Section 13 I think). The distinction, according to Husserl, must be maintained for two reasons. In the first place because two names can differ in their meaning but name the same object. For example Hesperus and Phosporous mean (respectively) the morning star and the evening star, but they both pick out the planet Venus. In Frege's terminology Hesperus and Phosphorous are each a sense and they have one reference, Venus. In the second place, the distinction must be maintained because two expressions can have the same meaning but refer to two different objects. For example "a horse" always has the same meaning (sense), but is context sensitive, picking out different horses in different contexts.
One weird thing: I said that Husserl only accepts the gist of Frege's distinction. This is because, ror Frege sentences do not refer to (real) objects, but truth values (weird!), Husserl doesn't even mention this (at least not in the bits I've read), which seems good. I'm not quite sure why Frege thinks sentences don't refer to (real) objects, but he doesn't.
