Abstract

While this is the most recent volume to appear in the continuing work of a critical edition of Husserl's collected works, it contains Husserl's first published book, The Philosophy of Arithmetic. This is the famous study in which Husserl--under the influence of J. S. Mill and Brentano--undertook a psychologistic interpretation of the origin and validity of mathematical principles. Under the impulse of Frege's criticism, Husserl came to repudiate this view. Indeed, even without this external impetus, one suspects that the dynamics of Husserl's own thought would have eventually carried him beyond such a view, for his concern even in this first book is to find a "strict" foundation for mathematics, a concern which seems to be clearly at odds with the naturalism and empiricism of the psychologistic theory. The tension between these two--the empirical and the ideal character of mathematical thinking--is reflected in the subtitle of this work: Logical and Psychological Investigations. "Part One" concerns the psychological origin of number: "Part Two" the logical roots. The editor has also included in this volume a set of "Supplementary Texts ". Among these is included the Habilitationsschrift of 1878, The Concept of Number: Psychological Analyses. The rest of this volume is made up of a set of treatises which were to be part of the planned second volume of The Philosophy of Arithmetic, which never appeared. This volume was to be concerned with such topics as the logic of signs, the a priori character of Arithmetic, the imaginary in Arithmetic, and axiomatic systems.--J. D. C.