“There is a historiographical myth or tale in analytic circles according to .which in his youth Husserl was a very naive philosopher who in his Philosophie der Arithmetik (1) of 1891 not only propounded an extreme form of psychologism but also dared to criticize the almighty Frege’s views as presented in Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (2) of 1884. According to the tale, it was Frege’s ‘devastating’ critique of Husserl’s book in 1894 and the study by Husserl of other of Frege’s writings which were responsible for Husserl’s abandonment of psychologism in the first volume of his Logische Untersuchungen(3) of 1900/1901 and his embracing of Frege’s views on logic, mathematics and their relationship, and of Frege’s distinction between sense and reference of expressions in the First Logical Investigation.

Husserl, however, so says the tale, fell once more out of grace into psychologism in the second volume of Logische Untersuchungen and never freed himself from such a pernicious addiction. To this historiographical myth have adhered many influential scholars in the analytic tradition, e.g., Evert W. Beth in The Foundations of Mathematics, (4) Michael Dummett in Frege: Philosophy of Language, (5) Dagfinn Follesdal in Husserl and Frege, (6) and, of course, almost every Fregean scholar that has ever mentioned issue, e.g., Hans Sluga (7) and Christian Thiel, (8) to name just two of the most distinguished. It is then no mystery that Husserl’s views on logic and mathematics have been completely ignored in the analytic tradition.

The historiographical myth has been challenged in my dissertation of 1973 and especially in my paper “Remarks on Sense and Reference in Frege and Husserl,” (10) and also by J. N. Mohanty in various writings, (11) and more recently and forcefully by Claire Ortiz Hill in her Word and Object in Frege and Russell (12) and in other writings. The result of such investigations is essentially the following: (1) Philosophie der Arithmetik, although published in 1891, represents Husserl’s views at most up to 1890; (2) Husserl made the distinction between the sense and reference of expressions around 1890, and it is present in his review of the first volume of Ernst Schroder’s Vorlesungen ber die Algebra der Logik also published in 1891, as Frege himself acknowledged in a letter to Husserl of May of that same year; (13) (3) Husserl’s views on logic and mathematics as presented in Logische Untersuchungen and other later writings were developed from 1890 to 1895 with total independence of Frege, but under the influence of Bolzano, Lotze, and others, and of the mathematical work of Riemann, Cantor, and others, and are clearly distinct from Frege’s; (4) there was no conversion to psychologism in the second volume of Logische Untersuchungen and later writings. By the way, as Claire Ortiz Hill has shown, (14) Husserl was not the propounder of a naive extreme psychologism in Philosophie der Arithmetik as Frege and his uncritical followers would like us to believe. But even if that were the case, it is a very unusual piece of scholarship to consider only a philosopher’s early views on a subject while completely ignoring his mature views. If Kantian scholars from the very beginning had examined only Kant’s pre-critical writings, we would very probably never had learnt about his duly famous views on space and time in his critical philosophy.” (pp. 199-200)

(1) E. Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik, mit ergänzenden Texten, Husserliana, vol. XII (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1970 [1891]).

(2) G. Frege, Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Hamburg: Centenarausgabe, Meiner, 1986 [1884]), introduction by C. Thiel.

(3) E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Husserliana, vols. XVIII and XIX (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1975 and 1984 [1900/01,2nd ed. rev.,1913]).

(4) E. W. Beth, The Foundations of Mathematics, 2nd ed. rev. (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1965 [1959]), p. 353.

(5) M. Dummett, Frege, Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, 1973), XLII-XLIII and p. 158.

(6) D. Follesdal, “Husserl and Frege,” Mind, Meaning and Mathematics, ed. L. Haaparanta (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 3-47, translation of his 1958 Norwegian Masters thesis.

(7) E.g., in H. Sluga, Gottlob Frege (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p..2, and especially pp. 39-40 and his “Semantic Content and Cognitive Sense,” Frege Synthesized, ed. L. Haaparanta and J. Hintikka (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986), pp. 3-47.

(8) E. g. in C. Thiel’s Editor’s Introduction to the Centenarausgabe edition of Frege’s Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, p. LI.

(9) “Edmund Husserls Philosophie der Logik und Mathematik im Lichte der genwärtigen Logik und Grundlagenforschung,” Ph.D. diss., Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, 1973.

(10) “Remarks on Sense and Reference in Frege and Husserl,” Kant-Studien 73, no. 4 (1982): 425-39, chapter 2 of the present book. Although published in 1982, this paper was accepted for publication in 1979.

(11) E. g. in J. N. Mohanty, Husserl and Frege (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982).

(12) C. O. Hill, Word and Object in Husserl, Frege and Russell (Athens, OH: University of Ohio Press, 1991). See also her “Frege’s Attack on Husserl and Cantor” (chapter 6 of the present book), “Husserl and Frege on Substitutivity” (chapter 1 of the present book), and “Husserl and Hilbert on Completeness” (chapter 10 of the present book).

(13) See Frege’s Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, ed. G. Gabriel et. al. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1976), pp. 94-98.

(14) See Hill’s “Frege’ Attack on Husserl and Cantor,” chapter 6 of the present book.

From: Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock, To Be a Fregean or To Be a Husserlian: That is the Question for Platonists, in: Claire Ortiz Hill and F. E. Rosado Haddock, Husserl or Frege? Meaning, Objectivity, and Mathematics, La Salle: Open Court, 2000, pp. 199-220.