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research tend to take up? This will enable us to specify the first sense of the phenomenological maxim (the demand to do demonstrative work), that is, to ascertain the mode of treatment appropriate to these matters by reading it from the concretion of its principle. We are making no deduction from the idea of phenomenology but are reading the principle from its concretion in the research work. The concretion is characterized by the discoveries, and now it is only a question of the extent to which they supply content to the formal sense of the research principle: What field of subject matter, what regard toward it and what mode of dealing with it are intended? The clarification of the phenomenological principle according to field and mode of treatment then permits the legitimacy of the designation 'phenomenology' to emerge of its own accord and to set itself off from misinterpretations.
[Let us proceed to the first question: Toward what matters does phenomenology tend?] The initial phenomenological investigations were investigations in logic and the theory of knowledge. They were inspired by the goal of a scientific logic and epistemology. The question here is: Do the three discoveries-the elaboration of intentionality, of the categorial and the way of access to it, and of the apriori-give us the ground on which the matters of logic can be located and demonstrated?
Logic is the science of thinking and of the laws of thought, but not of thinking as a psychic occurrence and the laws regulating its course, but instead of thinking as the lawfulness of the object, of that which is thought as such. All thinking is at the same time expression, understood as the meaningful fixation of what is thought. In the area of the objects of logic, this refers to matters like meaning, concept, assertion, and proposition. Traditionally, knowing was conceived in terms of self-contained and finished cognitions formulated in assertions, propositions, judgments, where judgments are composed of concepts and complexes of judgments are syllogisms. All of these and what they intend imply lawful structures. Judging is carried out in representational or generally in intuitive apprehension; it thus involves truth and objectivity. The concepts of these objects are to be genuinely secured, which means that they are to be drawn from themselves and demonstrated in reference to themselves. The objects of logic are meaning, concept, assertion, proposition, judgment, state of affairs, objectivity, fact, law, being, and the like. Where and as what can and must such objects become accessible? Is there a field of objects which in and of themselves are coherent in content? Does the unity of a field of subject matter lead to the unity of a discipline which treats these objects? Or are these objects in the end abandoned to any passing shrewdness, which invents something for them in coarse and loose speculation? Or is a demonstration possible at all for these matters