Recent Research on Logic

A modern translation of Heidegger's early work "Recent Research on Logic '', originally published in 1912 under the German title "Neuere Forschungen Uber Logic". This edition contains a new afterword by the Translator, a timeline of Heidegger's life and works, a philosophic index of core Heideggerian concepts and a guide for Existentialist terminology across 19th and 20th century Existentialists. This translation is designed for readability and accessibility to Heidegger's enigmatic and dense philosophy. Complex and specific philosophic terms are translated as literally as possible and academic footnotes have been removed to ensure easy reading.

This essay emphasises the shift from psychologism (the emphasis on psychological principles in logic) to a more transcendental approach, highlighting the work of philosophers such as Husserl and Bolzano in this transition. The paper discusses the nature of logic, its relation to psychology, and the implications of these changes for understanding concepts, judgment, and the theory of categories. It considers the distinction between mental acts and logical content, and argues for the intrinsic value of logic apart from the empirical disciplines. The paper also touches on object theory, judgement theory, and the interplay between logic and mathematics, underlining the continuing development and complexity of logical principles and their application in different fields of study.

Heidegger’s interrogation of logic here orbits a paradox: its formal purity is haunted by the specter of judgment’s existential ground. Prefiguring Husserl’s critique of psychologism, he dissects the "crisis of validity" in logical positivism—how Geltung (validity) is severed from the act of thinking, reduced to tautological systems (Lotze, Sigwart) that mask their metaphysical debts. Yet unlike Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Heidegger sidesteps transcendental idealism, probing instead the unthought horizon of logic’s relation to truth as disclosure. The text’s Neo-Scholastic undertones surface in its Aristotelian insistence on syllogism as logos incarnate—a proto-phenomenological move that gestures toward Being’s latent presence in logical form. But this early framework remains brittle: validity is still a "problem," not yet the existential-ontological condition of Being and Time. Strikingly absent is the later notion of aletheia; here, logic’s "laws" float untethered from Dasein’s temporal clearing. The work’s significance lies in its negative space—a failed synthesis of medieval logica docens and modern formalism that exposes the need to dynamite logic’s "self-evidence." By 1929, Heidegger will declare logic "the metaphysics of truth," but in 1912, its chains still clank faintly, a scholastic remnant in the forge of his thought.