ABSTRACT
Edmund Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic 1 is an attempt to establish the foundation of arithmetic by means of a psychological account of what he refers to as “cardinal number [Anzahl] 2 in the true and authentic sense of the word” (PA, 116). Husserl’s critical self-understanding of the failure of this attempt has met with general acceptance in the literature. There is, however, no consensus regarding exactly why Husserl’s attempt failed. Gottlob Frege’s critical review of the PA, 3 in which he took Husserl to task for “the influx of psychology into logic” (Frege, 324/332)—to the mutual detriment of each—along with certain remarks made by Husserl, have lent credence to a widely held view that Husserl’s main dissatisfaction with the PA can be traced to the work’s psychologism, that is, to its reduction of both the objects and the objectivity of logical concepts to psychological presentations (Vorstellungen). On this view, Husserl’s statement in the Foreword to the first edition of the Logical Investigations about his “doubts of principle, as to how to reconcile the objectivity of mathematics, and of all science in general, with a psychological foundation for logic,” 4 along with his remark recorded by W. R. Boyce Gibson “that Frege’s criticism of the Philosophy of Arithmetic … hit the nail on the head,” 5 are interpreted as endorsing Frege’s criticism. However, as Dallas Willard has noted, “one searches in vain for passages in … [Husserl’s] earlier writings where he advocated such a psychologistic logic.” 6 In addition, J. N. Mohanty has shown that Husserl did not acquire the distinction between ‘object’, ‘concept’, and ‘presentation’ from Frege. 7
