ABSTRACT
Husserl's pure phenomenology is driven by the goal of making philosophy a rigorous science. Husserl's investigation of the formation of the concept of number in his first published work, the Philosophy of Arithmetic sought to establish its psychological genesis following Brentano's method. It is commonly assumed that Husserl's critique of psychologism in the Prolegomena has as one of its targets the psychological orientation of his investigations in Philosophy of Arithmetic. However, the kind of psychologism criticized in the Prolegomena is not to be found in Philosophy of Arithmetic. Husserl's formulation of pure phenomenology, however, owes another debt to his critique of the Philosophy of Arithmetic's psychologism besides the Platonism that he embraced in order to establish the ideal integrity characteristic of the unities of mathematics and pure logic. Three defining characteristics of Husserl's pure phenomenology can be traced to his response to the collapse of his original presupposition that authentic and symbolic number concepts are logically equivalent.
