WHAT EARLY HUSSERL CAN TELL US ABOUT

MATHEMATICAL INTUITION
By
Rasa Davidavičiūtė

Submitted to
Central European University
Department of Philosophy

In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Supervisor: István Bodnár

Budapest, Hungary
2014
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 ABSTRACT

The work of early Husserl occupies an uneasy place in the history of philosophy. His first

published monograph, Philosophy of Arithmetic, is often perceived as an immature work of

an amateur psychologist, which was rightly criticized by Frege. The main objective of my

thesis is to demonstrate that the utter rejection of Husserl’s early project has been unjustified.

More specifically, I argue that he anticipates both the contemporary definition and

application of mathematical intuition. In order to establish this, I firstly show that Frege

might have misinterpreted Husserl’s definition of the concept of number, and so his

influential characterization of Husserl’s early thought may be misleading. I then proceed to

the analysis of the definition and role of intuition in early Husserl’s philosophy of

mathematics and show that it highly resembles the use of intuition in the work of Charles

Parsons, who is credited as the flag-bearer of contemporary proponents of mathematical

intuition. Finally I address the question whether Husserl’s use of intuition in Philosophy of

Arithmetic can provide an answer to the access problem.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract .......................................................................................................................................i
Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... ii
1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1
2. Husserl’s Early Philosophy of Mathematics .......................................................................... 4
2.1. A Philosophical No-Man’s Land .................................................................................... 4
2.2. Frege’s Curse .................................................................................................................. 6
3. Mathematical Intuition in Philosophy of Arithmetic ............................................................ 11
3.1. Historical Introduction to the Notion of Intuition ......................................................... 11
3.2. A Kantian definition of Intuition .................................................................................. 13
3.3. The Role of Intuition in Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic ....................................... 19
3.4. Varieties of Psychologism: Mill, Wundt and Brentano ................................................ 24
4. Contemporary Applications of Mathematical Intuition ...................................................... 28
4.1. Mathematical Intuition Today: New Horizons, Old Distinctions ................................. 28
4.2. Parsons’ Application of Mathematical Intuition ........................................................... 32
5. Husserl’s Conception of Mathematical Intuition and the Contemporary Debates ............. 37
5.1. Husserl and the Access Problem ................................................................................... 37
5.2. Husserl as a Full-Blown Platonist: Between Maddy and Parsons ................................ 39
5.4. Critical Realism ............................................................................................................ 44
6. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 52
References ................................................................................................................................ 54
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 1. INTRODUCTION

The common reading of Husserl’s early work tends to be faultfinding: it is an

immature attempt to marry psychology and the definition of the concept of number, in which

he is reproducing the ideas of his teachers, Carl Stumpf and Franz Brentano, rather than

offering original insights. What seems to have contributed largely to the negative reception of

Husserl’s early work was Frege’s critical review of Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic,

which has by now come close to having the status of a manifesto of anti-psychologism in

mathematics. It seems to be a common way of thinking amongst analytic philosophers that

since Husserl himself turns his back on psychologism in his later work, Philosophy of

Arithmetic is not worth paying much attention to. Those who nevertheless focus on the

correspondence of Husserl and Frege tend to conclude that it was precisely Frege’s criticism

that influenced Husserl to reject psychologism and turn to Platonism.

In my thesis I will argue that such a quick dismissal of Husserl’s early work is largely

unwarranted. I will claim that Husserl, in his definition and application of mathematical

intuition, anticipated one of the contemporary uses of the concept. To this end I will focus on

the work of Charles Parsons, for it is in his writings that the notion of mathematical intuition

has been recently most thoroughly developed. Husserl applies the concept to the same cases –
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concrete perceptions – and for the same reasons – to explain how we have immediate

knowledge of a body of mathematical truths. Finally I will show that Husserl’s motivation for

introducing intuition in his epistemology resembles that of contemporary mathematical

realists –it may be seen as a means to answer the access problem.

All this said, I do not intend to claim that all of the criticisms that have been voiced

both by Husserl’s contemporaries and the more recent critics are entirely misguided. One of

the biggest obstacles to appreciating Husserl’s earliest work is the at times impenetrable

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 obscurity of his writing, which often leaves one guessing just what Husserl’s actual position

on one or the other issue was. This becomes especially counterproductive when the issues in

question are of central importance to the project of the book, as is the case with Husserl’s

ontological commitments. Thus, the reading of early Husserl can be an arduous investigative

process the results of which are, of course, subject to interpretations and disagreements.

However, as I already mentioned, what I think is much less subject to disagreement is

the answer to the question whether his work could be interesting to the contemporary

philosopher. In order to establish my point I will first show how Frege largely misinterpreted

Husserl’s early position, and thus unquestioned reliance on his criticisms is not only

counterproductive but also misleading. The third chapter will open with a historical

introduction to the use of intuition in philosophy, both of mathematics and more generally.

This will be followed by the analysis of the concept of mathematical intuition in Philosophy

of Arithmetic along with the historical background of both end of the XIX century

psychologism and where Husserl’s position parts ways with it. In the fourth chapter I will

center my attention on reconstructing contemporary uses of mathematical intuition, focusing

primarily on the work of Charles Parsons.

The fifth, and final, part of the thesis deals with the question of whether and how

could Husserl be seen as answering the access problem. Mathematical intuition is most

commonly evoked as an account for the epistemological issues stemming from Benacerraf’s
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Dilemma –how do we, beings located entirely in space-time, could have any contact, and

thus, knowledge, of the ideal objects in the Platonic realm. As Husserl seems to be also

committed to some form of realism, his use of mathematical intuition resembles that of

contemporary realists not only in the way it is defined, but also in the way it is used to

combat the afore mentioned epistemological problem.

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 Just what role intuition is to play in this will be determined by Husserl’s ontological

commitments. I address two plausible interpretations, that of a Platonist ontology and that of

a critical realist one, in the vein of Kant and Brentano. I conclude by claiming that the issue

of Husserl’s ontological commitments remains an open question, as decisive reasons to favor

one interpretation over the other have yet to be found.

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 2. HUSSERL’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS

2.1. A Philosophical No-Man’s Land

Michael Dummett once observed that Frege and Husserl “may be compared with the

Rhine and the Danube, which rise quite close to one another and for a time pursue roughly

parallel courses, only to diverge in utterly different directions and flow into different seas”

(Dummett: 1994, 26). The quote accurately captures the way Husserl is perceived by most

contemporary philosophers– while his philosophical roots are akin to those of Frege,

eventually he takes a radically different course, which is seen to be the most significant and

fruitful time of his career. One need not look far for reasons. His later work1 played a pivotal

role in the development of both German and French existentialism, further developments in

phenomenology and post-structuralism, in turn making him one of the “godfathers” of

continental philosophy. Perhaps as a result, few analytic philosophers see much interest in

Husserl’s later work, and those who do take an interest in little else than finding parallels

between his phenomenology and the contemporary theories of consciousness.

Husserl’s earliest work, however, fails to arouse much interest in either of the two

camps. Continental philosophers tend to see this period as essentially immature and thus not

worthy of much attention. The very few who do read Philosophy of Arithmetic (henceforth
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PA) primarily focus on finding the roots of Husserl’s phenomenological method in general,

rather than his views on the philosophy of mathematics. This way his early mathematical and

logical investigations are discarded as irrelevant to anything that followed them and PA is

generally perceived as a failed attempt to salvage psychologism in philosophy of

mathematics, one final digression before the truly relevant philosophical work.

1
Here I will take the early period to be Husserl’s writings from the preparation of his Habilitation Thesis to the
publication of Logical Investigations (1887-1900/01).

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 Given that Husserl’s early interests are exclusively in philosophy of mathematics, and

that he corresponded with and commented on Frege, it would not be unreasonable to expect

that his early period is more popular among analytic philosophers. However, the evaluation

of his early writings seems to be one of the few things continental and analytic philosophers

tend to agree upon – the period before LI and the revolutionary method of phenomenology is

the time of apprenticeship, rather than original insights.

There are many reasons for this dismissal, not the least of which is the fact that

Husserl himself viewed the majority of his writings before LI as misguided and immature. He

remarks in his Tagebuch from 1921, June 4th:

How immature, how naïve, how almost childish this work seems to me; and

not without reason did its publication trouble my conscience… I was a mere

beginner, without proper knowledge of philosophical problems, and with

insufficiently trained philosophical skills” (Husserl –quoted from Bell—1990,

40).

At least part of the naïveté that Husserl is referring to has to do with his defense of

psychologism that was a relevant influence on his early work. Indeed, by the time of writing

LI Husserl himself has become an ardent critic of such an approach. The objective of his

criticism is to show that the introduction of psychologism into apriori disciplines such as
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logic and other apriori domains will yield in unsolvable contradictions and is thus unfounded.

The main target the thought of scholars such as John Stuart Mill,2 Theodor Lipps, Gerardus

Heymans, and Wilhelm Jerusalem.

What is characteristic for all of these thinkers is the contention that logic is in one

way or another a part of psychology and thus should be studied appropriately. Husserl’s has

three prominent arguments against such views, outlined in Part Two of LI: (1) If logical rules

2
Here it ought to be noted that it is not entirely clear what was Mill’s position on the relationship between logic
and psychology, however Husserl certainly takes him to be one to claim that logic is a part of psychology.

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 were modeled by psychological rules, the former would have to be as vague as the latter.

Surely not all logical rules are vague, thus they cannot all be modeled upon the psychological

laws (Husserl: 2001, 46). (2) The laws of psychology are not known a priori, contrary to

those of logic, therefore the laws of logic are not equivalent to those of psychology (ibid., 47-

48). (3) The laws of psychology refer to psychological entities, the laws of logic refer to

eternal truths that are not psychological, therefore the laws of psychology are not the laws of

logic (ibid., 51-54).

Nevertheless, it is not clear whether the criticisms in LI necessarily apply to

everything in PA. I will elaborate more on this in the following chapters, however, here it will

suffice to say that if we consider Husserl’s main task in PA to be an account of how we gain

access to abstract objects such as numbers, the psychologistic nature of the work may

translate to nothing else but an epistemological orientation, rather than an inquiry into the

nature of numbers. Furthermore, as I will show, Husserl certainly does not assume that

numbers are subjective representations crafter through counting.

However, this was Frege’s reading of PA; and as the majority of contemporary

philosophers, especially those in the analytic tradition, come to know of Husserl’s early work

through Frege’s criticism, it is not difficult to see why it is common to assume that Husserl’s

early writings are a essentially a failure. In order to argue that this is not necessarily the case,
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in the proceeding section I will show how Frege might have misinterpreted Husserl.

Therefore the rejection of his work, based solely on Frege’s criticism may be unwarranted.

2.2. Frege’s Curse

There is an old tale amongst analytic philosophers that it was precisely Frege’s critical

review of Husserl’s PA coupled with the latter’s ardent study and the consequent

embracement of Frege’s views on logic and mathematics that led him to denounce

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 psychologism in the first volume of LI.3 Given this common conviction, namely, that it was

Frege who was responsible for any meaningful claims about philosophy of mathematics

Husserl has ever made, it is not at all surprising that Husserl’s early work has been viewed so

unfavorably. After all, if Husserl is essentially claiming the same things as Frege claimed

before him, why not simply look at what Frege had to say?

Frege’s anti-psychologism is a characteristic mark of his philosophy. He provided

various counterarguments to psychologism, however the ones that reoccur most often and are

the most prominent in his “Review of Dr. E. Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic” are the

following. (i) Mathematics is exact, while psychology is vague and imprecise, and it is

implausible to assume that one could be explained by means of the other. (ii) The subject

matter of psychology are representations (Vorstellungen) that are inherently subjective, while

the subject matter of logic and mathematics are ideal objects, that are universal and objective.

If we reduce mathematics to psychology, we end up assuming that mathematical objects are

mere representations, and thus are subjective. However, if they are subjective, how are we to

account for their universal applicability? These and similar considerations lead Frege to

conclude that Husserl’s psychologistic philosophy of mathematics was a doomed venture.

It is true that PA is plagued with obscurities in argument, poor choice of terminology

and many other issues that contribute to the perception of the work as a misguided attempt of
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an amateur psychologist. However, it is both a mistake and a large misinterpretation of

Husserl’s work to assume that all that is noteworthy in his philosophy of mathematics is there

thanks to Frege.

Most importantly, Frege mistakenly takes the general aim of Husserl’s philosophy of

mathematics to provide a psychologistic account of the nature of numbers, in the vein of Mill.

It rather was, as Tieszen accurately puts it, “an investigation into the a priori conditions for

3
See Beth (1965, 353), Dummett (1973, 158), Follesdal (1994, 3-47), Sluga (1980, 39-40) and Sluga(1986, 3-
47)

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 the possibility of the consciousness and knowledge of number” (Tieszen: 1994, 108). Mill’s

conviction was that numbers were nothing but our subjective representations of aggregates of

units, and that such representations, and in turn our concepts, are crafted by the psychological

processes involved in, say, counting. Nothing of this sort can be found in PA. If one pays

careful attention and is patient enough with his obscure prose, it is clear that Husserl is

attempting to give an epistemological account of our concepts of numbers rather than define

their ontology. There is no talk of the nature of numbers or number representations and

definitely no mention that they are in any sense of the term subjective. In this respect, as

David Bell notes, “adoption of the methodological constrains which in part determine the

nature of descriptive psychology is entirely motivated” (Bell: 1990, 61).

Husserl studied the works of Frege extensively –this is evident not only from his

notes that can be found in the Nachlass,4 remarks in his letters to Stumpf,5 but also from the

lengthy passage in PA devoted to the criticisms of Frege’s theory. Indeed if one reads PA

carefully, one of the prominent impressions that she may have is its contra-Fregean nature.

Husserl, contesting the logicist approach to the definition of number, states: “no concept can

be thought without foundation in a concrete intuition.” (Husserl: 2003, 83). That is to say, in

order to demonstrate the soundness of arithmetical knowledge, one must show how its

concepts can be traced to concrete cases, or phenomenal experiences in which the number

concepts appear. A definition of number as the extension of the “concept equinumerous with
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the concept F” is too artificial, that is, not what we mean by number in ordinary language.

However we might worry that both Husserl and Frege missed each other’s respective

points. While they are both attempting to give an account of the foundations of arithmetic,

they seem to be answering two utterly different questions in philosophy of mathematics.

Frege is more concerned with semantical issues and the truth conditions of the propositions in

4
See (Husserl: 1970)
5
See (Husserl: 1990)

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 which number terms appear. Husserl, on the other hand, seems to be convinced that no

foundations can be provided without first giving an account of how knowledge of numbers is

possible. What is interesting is that neither of them gave an all-encompassing account of

numbers–Frege famously struggled in explaining how we come to have knowledge of ideal

objects, if we are to disregard any experiential input; Husserl, in turn, without addressing

semantical issues, does not have a proper account of the truth conditions of mathematical

propositions. In some respect their dispute continues today, the only difference being that

Frege’s position is well known, while Husserl’s is neglected in comparison.

At the risk of overgeneralizing, we may make a distinction between two

contemporary approaches to the foundations of mathematics. One, in the vein of Frege’s

work, primarily focuses on the semantical issues concerning mathematics, say, the questions

what makes mathematical propositions true. A currently very popular example of such an

approach is neo-logicism, advocated, among others, by Bob Hale and Crispin Wright. As the

name suggests, the theory has direct links to Frege, the essential difference between his work

and that of Hale and Wright’s being that that the latter replace Frege’s ill-fated Basic Law V

with Hume’s principle to account for the issues arising from Russell’s paradox. However, just

as Frege did, neo-logicists struggle with explaining how we come to have knowledge of

purely abstract mathematical entities. Which is to say, that the epistemological questions
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remain largely unanswered.

The second approach focuses primarily on epistemology, setting semantical questions

aside or simply claiming that mathematical propositions are true in virtue of them referring to

objects in the Platonic Heaven. Proponents of such an approach will often rely heavily on our

everyday experiences in which mathematical propositions are involved. These theories

primarily tend to focus on the simplest mathematical objects, such as small numbers or

elementary mathematical operations such as, for example, addition of small numbers. In

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 short, mathematical objects that could be accessible by way of direct experience. Examples of

such theories are those of, among others, Charles Parsons (Parsons: 1980, 2007), Mark

Steiner (Steiner: 1975) and Penelope Maddy (Maddy: 1980, 1997).6 What is characteristic to

these accounts is that a significant role is ascribed to intuition, which is supposed to account

for our epistemic ability to immediately connect concrete instances with the corresponding

abstract concepts.

Surely Husserl’s work in PA did not influence the work of Parsons, Steiner, Maddy

and others, to the extent that Frege’s work influenced that of Wright and Hale. However we

can evidently see the same strategies in Husserl’s work as in that of the proponents of the

epistemological approach to philosophy of mathematics. This makes PA not only a piece

worth studying from the perspective of the history of philosophy, but also something that

could potentially contribute to the ongoing debates in mathematical epistemology.

Before we move on the role of intuition in Husserl’s project, some preliminary

remarks ought to be made on how intuition is going to be used here. Due to its common

employment in ordinary language, as something of a “mysterious sixth sense”, the term and

especially its application to epistemology tends to raise suspicion. To avoid possible

misunderstandings and misinterpretations, in the following two sections I will provide a brief

historical consideration of the philosophical application of the term and the definitions that
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followed it.

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Maddy’s theory primarily deals with sets, rather than elementary numbers, but her account of knowledge of
these mathematical objects is, nevertheless, based on everyday experiences.

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 3. MATHEMATICAL INTUITION IN PHILOSOPHY OF ARITHMETIC

3.1. Historical Introduction to the Notion of Intuition7

The Latin term ‘intuitio’ first gained mainstream philosophical attention in the works

of the scholastics. As Jaakko Hintikka notes, what is remarkable about the scholastics’ use of

intuition is its broad scope. In the work of Scotus “intuitive cognitions are those which (i) are

of the object as existing and present and (ii) are caused in the perceiver directly by the

existing and present object” (Adams: 1987, 501). In Ockham’s thought “an intuitive

cognition of a thing is that in virtue of which one can have evident knowledge of whether or

not a thing exists, or more broadly, of whether or not a contingent proposition about the

present is true.” (ibid., 502).

What is characteristic to all of these uses of the term is that knowledge arrived to by

way of intuition is taken to be immediate and spontaneous, therefore many scholastic

philosophers came to equate intuitive knowledge with perceptual knowledge. However the

broad scholastic notion of intuition was short-lived. As Hintikka notes, “The geometrical and

mechanical vision of the world of early modern science showed that what looks like a direct

perceptions is in reality a complex process involving all sorts of inferences, albeit often

unspoken and even unconscious ones.” (Hintikka: 2003, 170). In the light of this, the
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subject’s relation to the perceived objects could no longer be thought as an immediate one,

and thus the attribution of intuition to objects of perception lost its force.

Although this severely limited the scope of intuition, it was generally taken that the

domain to which it could nevertheless be applied is “the world of our ideas and mental acts”

(ibid.), as we do have direct and unmediated access to it, or so it was argued. This position is

7
The historical reconstruction of the use of intuition from the scholastics to Locke here is in large part based on
Hintikka (2003, 169-173).

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 well summarized by Locke, who claims that “Intuitive knowledge is the perception of the

certain agreement or disagreements of two ideas immediately compared together” (Locke:

1999, 681).

Another philosopher of the Early Modern period in whose views intuition plays a

significant role and who, at least in part, influenced the contemporary views of intuition was

Descartes. In this brief summary it will suffice to mention two essential features of Cartesian

intuition: (i) Descartes takes objects of our intuition to be independent of the mind:

When, for example, I imagine a triangle, even if perhaps no such figure exists,
or has ever existed anywhere outside of my thought, there is still a determinate
nature, or essence, or form of the triangle which is immutable and eternal, and
not invented by me or dependent on my mind (Descartes: 1985, 45).
Thus, if we have an intuition of some mathematical property, we have it in virtue of

our minds somehow managing to forge contact with the mathematical objects or properties. It

is important to note, however, that even though intuition is supposed to have the ability to put

the agent in contact with the mind-independent objects, Descartes does not provide any novel

conception of it and relies on its characterization of “immediate knowledge”, as did those

before him.

(ii) While Descartes often mentions the analogy with perception when defining it, he

takes intuition to be fully distinct from sensation:

But if I want to think of a chiliagon, although I understand that it is a figure

consisting of a thousand sides just as well as I understand the triangle to be a
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three-sided figure, I do not in the same way imagine the thousand sides or see
them as if they were present before me. It is true that since I am in the habit of
imaging something whenever I am in the habit of imaging something
whenever I think of a corporeal thing, I may construct in my mind a confused
representation of some figure. (Descartes: 1985, 50/ AT 72)

Alas, views of those as Descartes’ raises a further issues –how can we ever be sure

that such intuitions would represent anything substantial about the world, if all they can show

us is our ideas that may as well be considered to be subjective representations. Attempts to

ground such justification, for example by way of innate ideas, which was central to

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 Descartes’ philosophy, were heavily damaged by empiricist criticism and eventually fell out

of fashion. This way, as Hintikka observes, these and similar criticisms “eroded the content

of the idea of intuition until it became little more than a synonym for immediacy” (Hintikka:

2003, 171).

3.2. A Kantian definition of Intuition

The use of mathematical intuition gains its prominence after Kant’s work; and, as

Parsons notes, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was precisely “Kant

[who] offered a kind of a paradigm of a philosophical conception of intuition applied to

mathematics” (Parsons: 2007, 193). A philosopher who falls decisively under this paradigm

is Edmund Husserl, even though his application of intuition deviates considerably from that

of Kant’s.

In the first chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason (henceforth CPR) Kant writes:

Our cognition arises from two fundamental sources in the mind, the first of
which is the reception of representations (the receptivity of impressions), the
second the faculty for cognizing an object by means of these representations
(spontaneity of concepts); through the former an object is given to us, through
the latter it is thought in relation to that representation.[…] Intuition and
concepts therefore constitute the elements of all our cognition, so that neither
concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way, nor intuition
without concepts can yield a cognition. (Kant: 1999, 193)
The passage introduces two central notions of Kant’s epistemology –intuition

(Anschauung) and concept (Begriff). The most relevant distinction between the two is that
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while concepts are mediate and general, intuitions are immediate and singular. As Janiak

points out, each represent objects, properties or states of affairs but both do so distinctly

(Janiak, 2009). While the precise relation between these two terms is a contested question

between Kant scholars, the following are the most common ways to characterize it: intuition

is (i) the epistemic ability of “picking out” a singular concrete X with all its perceptible

properties (whether directly, or through imagination); (ii) the epistemic ability of

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 immediately connecting the said particular to a concept, which attributes a distinct meaning

to it.

The question whether intuition should be considered to be a content or an act, has

been a matter of dispute among Kant scholars.8 To the best of my knowledge, Kant does not

concern himself much with this issue. Throughout CPR he often uses intuition to designate

both a singular representation,9 as opposed to a concept, and the act of attributing concrete

singular representations to the general concept, making intuition a certain epistemic ability

that allows the recognition that a particular concept belongs to this singular representation, an

“immediate cognition” of kinds.10 This ambiguity is also present in the works of both Husserl

and Parsons, but the use of intuition as immediate cognition is dominant.

It must be noted that Kant is careful not to fully equate intuition with perception, even

though intuition can be applied “only insofar an object is given to us by means of sensibility”

(Kant: 1999, 155). Intuition is distinct from sensation alone, although Kant considers it to be

“something akin to perception”. Intuition, as opposed to mere sensation, is supposed to

represent something about the object in question, while sensations alone can only convey

information about the subject’s states. However, intuition is not entirely distinct from

sensation: “Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone affords us intuitions”

(Kant: 1999, 172).

This leads to one of the central claims of Kant’s epistemology, namely that sensation,
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through which intuitions are given, imposes certain forms on the intuitable objects –space

being the form of all objects outside of the subject, and time being the form of all possible

objects of intuition. This obtains to all knowable objects and is supposed to be the answer to

the question of how are we to know anything a priori about the world, if all our knowledge

stems from experience. In the introduction to the CPR Kant writes: “If intuition has to
8
Among others see Hintikka (1969), Parsons (1982), Thomson (1972), Wilson (1975), Falkenstein (1991).
9
See Kant (1999, 639/A731-B741), Kant (1819, 52-57)
10
Kant (1999, 155/A19-B33).

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 conform to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of

them a priori; but if the object conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I

can very well represent this possibility to myself” (Kant: 1999, 110). What is meant by this is

that a priori knowledge is possible because “the sensory world is constructed by the human

mind from a combination of sensory matter that we receive passively and a priori forms [of

time and space] that are supplied by our cognitive faculties” (Janiak: 2009).

Here we might ask just how can we have knowledge of mathematical objects then, if

cognition first and foremost is grounded in intuition which functions similarly to perception.

Mathematical objects in themselves, after all, are taken to exist in the abstract realm, rather

than the concrete and perceivable form. Kant’s answer to this is the claim that “we are

intuitively aware of mathematical subject matter via illustrations that draw on our capacity of

sensation” (Chudnoff: forthcoming, 15). This is to say that in order to cognize a mathematical

proposition I have to have an intuition of a certain object that would correspond to it, either

concrete or imaginary. To illustrate this claim, Kant discusses the cognition of a ‘triangle’:

“Thus I construct a triangle by exhibiting an object corresponding to this concept, either

through mere imagination, in pure intuition, or on paper, in empirical intuition…” (Kant:

1999, 630). This brings us to an essential feature of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics.

Intuition does not provide access to mathematical objects, it can only yield in knowledge of
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appearances and not about things in themselves (Dinge an sich). In this way the mind is

attributed a creative role, providing access only to objects that are interpreted through the

prism of human cognition.

Kant’s ideas have been very important to later philosophy of mathematics and logic,

both as a direct influence and as an object of criticism. The early twentieth century

developments in the foundations of mathematics were directly influenced by Kant’s thought,

with both Hilbert and Brouwer mentioning their Kantian roots on more than one occasion.

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 Frege’s logicism, at least in part, takes Kant’s use of intuition in philosophy of mathematics

to be one of the main ideas to be refuted by his logicism. What is more, towards the end of

his life, convinced that his logicist program had failed, Frege turned precisely to the Kantian

notion of intuition to establish the new foundations of mathematics.

The relation between Kant’s ideas and those of the scholars’ belonging to the

psychologistic trend is ambivalent. The radical empiricism of Mill, at least in part, was a

reaction to Kantian views. On the other hand, Husserl’s teacher, Franz Brentano, as we will

see, while critical of Kant’s general project, incorporated crucial aspects of it into his own

system. Other psychologistic oriented philosophers such as Paul Natorp and Friedrich

Paulsen are frequently labeled as neo-Kantian. Both Paulsen, who was Husserl’s teacher in

Berlin, and Natorp, Husserl’s colleague, had an influence on his early work.

However, Husserl’s conception of intuition, while heavily influenced by Kant’s work,

should not be taken to be equivalent to Kant’s. Firstly, it is not clear whether Husserl had the

same ontological commitments as Kant did, or was closer to someone like Descartes,

claiming that intuition provides direct access to mathematical objects. The latter

interpretation seems dominant between early Husserl scholars. Most prominently it is

defended by Richard Tieszen, who seems to take much of its supposed plausibility from the

fact that Husserl does use intuition in the quasi-Cartesian way in his later works, dating from

the publication of LI. However, Husserl’s background and influences at the time of writing
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PA and his own criticism of realism, at least that in the vein of Frege, may suggest a different

interpretation of his ontology. I will have more to say on this in the chapters to follow, but

here it will suffice to note that it is in no way obvious just what Husserl’s exact position was

and one should be cautious not to attribute him views that were not his, either entirely

Kantian or otherwise.

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 The most prominent difference between Kant and Husserl is, as I already noted above,

that intuition for Husserl is primarily a form of immediate cognition, rather than something

that designates a concrete particular (which in Husserl’s terminology is simply a

representation (Representazion)), and in this respect he is much closer to the pre-Kantian uses

of the term. The same will hold to the contemporary views of intuition that I will address in

here. Summarizing we may say that the following three aspects of Kantian intuition are

common to both Husserl and the contemporary uses of intuition, as that of Parsons:

(i) Intuition is an epistemic capacity that is primarily involved in connecting concrete

instances of objects with the abstract (or quasi-abstract) objects/concepts to which

they correspond;

(ii) Intuitive knowledge that yields from intuition is immediate as opposed to mediate,

inferential knowledge;

(iii) Intuition is primarily understood as intuition of objects, rather than intuition that a

proposition is true.

This third point should be clarified. It is common to differentiate between intuition of

and intuition that, where the former is part of a cognitive process that is involved in grasping

a distinct object and the latter one is a process involved in coming to know – or seeing the

intrinsic plausibility – of some proposition. Contemporary epistemology pays much more

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attention to propositional intuition, though this need not be all there is to it. Intuition of is

preferred by those philosophers who emphasize the analogy between intuition and perceptual

knowledge in the process of grasping mathematical concepts. On such a view, a necessary

condition for an intuition to arise is the agent’s direct awareness of the object. This is true not

only of Husserl but also of philosophers such as Parsons, Maddy and, to a lesser extent,

Steiner, for all of their conceptions of intuition involve direct connection to the perceived

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 object.11 What is characteristic of all of these views is that despite the differences in their

proposed ontologies of mathematical entities, intuition is the crucial element in the agent’s

coming to have knowledge of a certain mathematical object.

Finally, before turning to Husserl’s particular conception of intuition, I should

consider more generally the epistemic status of the propositions that result from intuitions.

On the classical analysis of knowledge, one knows that p just in case one has a justified, true

belief that p. Do these propositions that we arrive to by way of intuition satisfy these criteria?

In other words, does intuition result in knowledge? This question deserves a much more

thorough and careful treatment than I can provide her. It will have to suffice to say that, at

least, in the contemporary conceptions intuition is non-factive –intuition does not guarantee

truth. Intuition is generally taken to be at play in cases of immediate cognition, but it need not

necessarily yield in knowledge.12 The degrees of reliability of intuition will vary greatly from

one conception to another. However, at least in the part of contemporary philosophy of

mathematics that will interest me here, namely the mathematical epistemology of Charles

Parsons, it is taken that the degree of reliability of intuition is dependent on the competence

of the cognizer. But the non-factiveness thesis remains: intuition, however competent the

cognizer, may yield in faulty propositions,13 and thus is does not, in itself, guarantee

knowledge.
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Here Husserl parts ways with the contemporary approaches considerably, for he

considers intuitions to be factive. This, of course, is understandable, for Husserl is attempting

to give an account of how we arrive at knowledge of number-concepts. Given the role that

intuition plays in that process, it is desirable that intuition be reliable.

11
This is not to say that Husserl or Parsons’ theories do not allow for intuition of propositions, but the general
form of intuition that is applied is primarily intuition of objects.
12
Intuition that is modeled on perception may, for example, yield in faulty propositions for my perception may
be flawed.

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 The biggest problem with this is that intuitions, even if they are defined merely as

immediate cognition of sorts, are evidently very often fallible. To put it in other words, even

if I clearly and distinctly perceive that p it does not seem to guarantee the truth of p. In his

later career Husserl pays much attention to the issues arising from knowledge based on

perception, such as the fallibility of our perceptions. However no talk of it is present in PA.

Thus all I can do is provide a guess that he, following Descartes, Kant and Brentano, assumes

that if one’s intuition turns out to be wrong, one never had a genuine intuition in the first

place.

3.3. The Role of Intuition in Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic

As we will see Husserl’s analysis of the concept of number is first aimed at answering

the question of how number concepts are known. The focus on epistemology rather than, say

ontology or semantics, in Husserl’s early writings was highly influenced by his work with

Carl Stumpf, under whom he studied in Halle from 1887 to 1901. It was Stumpf’s idea that

the question of the knowledge of the concept has priority over the question of the content or

essence of the concept, for it is only through the careful attendance to the origin of our

knowledge of the concept that we are able to bring about the content of it.14 Guided by such

methodological provisions, Husserl thus claims that the major task of PA is to deal with the

‘origin of the concept of number’ (Husserl: 2003, 311) and is convinced that once the origin
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of our knowledge of the concept of number is illuminated, the essence of this concept will be

obvious and will require no further considerations15.

14
In On the Psychological Origin of Space Representations, a book studied closely by Husserl, Stumpf writes:
“The question ‘Whence arises a representation?’ is of course […] to be clearly distinguished from the other
question, ‘What is its knowledge content, once we have it?’. However these two questions are methodologically
related, insofar as the question of the origin of a representation leads us to the separate parts of which it is
composed, and therefore yields a more precise grasp of its content” (Stumpf: 1873, 3-4)
15
What is meant here by ‘origin of the concept’ should be understood as a question about the origin of the
knowledge of the concept, rather than the origin of the concept itself. Husserl main aim is to analyze our
knowledge of number-concepts, rather than how concepts are created.

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 Husserl begins his analysis by distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic

concepts of numbers. In short, we form an authentic concept by directly perceiving countable

objects and by way of intuition get to the concept of number. In contrast, an inauthentic

concept of number is generated in the mind without direct perceptual evidence – for example

through symbolic representation. Since authentic representations require direct perceptual

experience, we can approach only the elementary truths of arithmetic in this way. To surpass

this limitation, Husserl builds more complex concepts of number from the elementary

concepts and in so doing he can accommodate more sophisticated arithmetic.

In addition to what has been mentioned about Husserl’s use of intuition in the

previous section, one further clarification must be made. Since Husserl’s goal is to define the

concept of number, or, more precisely, how do we come to know numbers, he is interested in

cases where we immediately perceive/experience an instance of it. In many cases the mind

has to actively “purify” the perceptual representations of the irrelevant content in order to

grasp a basic concept of number. As an example of this, let us consider the agent’s perception

of two cups on the table. Husserl claims that in order to arrive at the numerical concept ‘two’

the agent has to be able to get rid of all the irrelevant features, such as, say, where the cups

are, what color they are, that one of them has a chipped edge, and so on, until she arrives at

the simple intuition of two objects. The mind could arrive at such an intuition by, for
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example, ignoring or disregarding parts of a given complex whole; or combining or unifying

singular parts of a given complex whole.

What is specific to Husserl’s early views on the sort of intuition involved in the

generation of elementary arithmetic concepts is that these primitive mental activities appear

parallel to intuition. Since Husserl grounds his analysis of the concept of number in everyday

perceptual experiences, he assumes that aside from being able to intuit, the mind must have a

certain apparatus to simplify the intuition. And while the mental activities involved in

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 simplifying the intuition can be conceptually distinguished from intuition, they nevertheless

do not appear separately and thus are an integral part of the process through which we come

to know number concepts.

Though perceptual awareness is crucial in defining a concept of number, it is not

enough for the formation of the concept of, say, ‘the number three’, that I am able to perceive

three books stacked by my bedside, for I can perceive the objects without actually grouping

them and thus recognizing that a certain number can be attributed to them. Thus the first step

in Husserl’s analysis is noting that the agent has a perceptual representation16 of a

determinate collection of objects including all of its specific features, such as its context and

the particular properties of the perceived objects. In order to arrive at the numerical concept,

however, I must be able to grasp the collection of objects as a unified whole having a distinct

numerical value, and this is precisely where intuition plays a crucial role. By perceiving a

concrete instance of objects, I intuit that a certain abstract numerical property can be ascribed

to them, and it is in this way that we arrive at knowledge of distinct numbers.

As noted above, Husserl’s early conception of intuition goes hand in hand with a

number of primitive mental activities, and the one that plays a central role in the generation

of number concepts is collective connection (kollektive Verbindung). Collective connection is

a way in which our mind reduces the initial perceptual representations to more basic
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intuitions. What is crucial here is that while I grasp a certain collection of distinct objects I

am able to see them as belonging to one sort17. As Willard puts it, “in such a case, a new and

distinctive type of whole is […] present to me with my field of consciousness: a totality or a

multiplicity – a concrete unity of x number of objects” (Willard: 2003, xviii). Once I have

grasped the collection of objects as a unified whole I am able to intuit the numerical property

16 This need not be limited to actual perceptual experience i.e. Husserl also considers cases of counting where the objects
involved are, say, imaginary or merely in our mind and not materially presented to us. Direct perception here is replaced
with imagination. See (Husserl: 2003, 17)
17
“Disregarding the properties that are different, we retain those that are common to all, as those which may belong to the
concept in question” (Husserl: 2003, 19).

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 that ought to be ascribed to them. The role of collective combination along with intuition is

thus to present the consciousness with an objective representation of a numerical property

that can be applied to a multiplicity of perceived units.

One arrives at a fully abstract object (i.e. a quantity stripped of even its distinct

numerical property) by performing yet another mental procedure, that of abstraction, by

which one bracket all the remaining concrete parts of the collection of concrete objects

perceived until he arrives at a concept of an indeterminate multiplicity. What follows from

this is that a number in itself is primarily a certain multiplicity of units, a mere featureless

‘something’ (Husserl: 2003, 123). A distinct numerical quantity, on the other hand, is given

to us by intuition and collective combination and is viewed by Husserl as property of that

multiplicity. It is important to note here that Husserl is not describing how number concepts

are created. His analysis requires that one already be equipped with a certain concept of

number, intuition merely connects the particulars with such concepts.

A perceptual account of knowledge of number is surely incapable of dealing with all

numerical concepts, since there is a limit to the number of distinct items we can explicitly

notice or focus our attention on. In order to tackle this issue, Husserl introduces inauthentic

concepts of number, which he defines as presentations via signs.18 As Bell notes, Husserl’s

theory of symbolic representation has three essential features: (1) The signs themselves are
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perceptible items; whether written or spoken they can be the content of concrete

representations. (2) They comprise a recursive progression, so that any possible combination

of numerals has a unique place in this series, and so that the series of numerals is generated

recursively, in that there is an effective procedure, which enables us to generate any later

term in the series on the basis of earlier terms. (3) One or more of the earliest signs in the

series must be correlated with the authentic concept of number (Bell: 1990, 56).

18“If a content is not directly given to us, as what it in fact is, but only given via signs that uniquely characterize it, then our
presentation of that content is not an authentic, but rather, a symbolic one” (Husserl: 193).

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 We may summarize Husserl’s definition of number as follows. Both authentic

concepts of numbers and determinate numerical quantities are arrived at by perceptual

intuition: I have direct contact with them in that I can immediately and assuredly say both

that this aggregate of objects is a multiplicity and that the property ‘having n units’ applies to

this multiplicity. On the other hand my ability to grasp larger numbers is based on my ability

to recognize their place in the arithmetical system of signs and, as Bell notes, my

understanding of large numbers reaches no further than my ability to correctly identify

numerals and their arithmetical signs (Bell: 1990, 57).

What Husserl’s analysis of the concept of number points to is that we cannot define

number separately from the cognitive processes in which we come to grasp it. As noted

above, such a definition becomes more of a specification of a priori conditions in which we

come to grasp it, rather than a formal description of the concept, like the one that Frege

proposes. In this sense, the non-inferential and immediate knowledge of number concepts

that we arrive to by way of intuition is of crucial importance.

It is important to note that Husserl’s use of intuition is not limited to mathematics

alone. Indeed, he stresses that it is applicable in any case of immediate cognition and it surely

should not be confined to the context of our knowledge of numbers. This observation will be

especially important to his later work. In LI and onwards intuition gets developed into an
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independent faculty and, one of its forms, namely, categorical intuition, is explicitly intended

to account for our knowledge of all ideal objects, whether mathematical or otherwise.

Because Husserl (perhaps due to his insistence upon the priority of epistemology)

does not touch upon ontological issues concerning numbers, that is, it is unclear whether he

takes them to be ideal objects, we cannot fully equate his conception of intuition in PA with

that in LI. However, I think it is plausible to state that we can see the headwaters of this

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 orientation already in the PA. It is defined in a similar fashion, namely as an immediate

cognition of sorts, and it is as essential to our knowledge of numbers in PA as it is in LI.

3.4. Varieties of Psychologism: Mill, Wundt and Brentano

Before we leave early Husserl for the time being, one more feature of his project

needs to be mentioned, namely psychologism. His teachers Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf

were one of the leading figures of the trend, thus In order to see what motivated Husserl’s

thought and, in turn, to understand his position better, it will be helpful to look a closer into

just how psychologism was defined and what version of it, if any, did Husserl commit

himself to.

The term ‘psychologism’ (Psychologismus) was coined by Johan Erdmann as a

characterization of the work of Eduard Beneke (Erdman 1870). In a way Beneke sets the

scene for psychologism, as it is in his works that we find the first explicit insistence on the

reduction of philosophy to psychology and the claim that genetic analysis of mental

phenomena is the only way to properly analyze concepts: an attitude shared almost

univocally by those sympathetic to psychologism. However, while we are at it, it must be

noted that there was no agreement neither over the definition of psychologism, nor of the list

of scholars who can be truly considered to belong exclusively to this position. Providing a

thorough and attentive analysis of the variety of approaches to psychologism is unfortunately

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beyond the scope of this thesis, thus here we will have to be satisfied with merely a broad-

stroked characterization of the main features of it, which, of course, is at the risk of being

over-generalized. However our task is to reconstruct the motivation and background of

Husserl’s thought and we should keep it front of us.

It is common to start one’s characterization of psychologism, especially that of

mathematical variety, with the discussion of the work of John Stuart Mill, as his System of

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 Logic (1843) was one of the main inspirations of the German psychologism. Mill’s

psychologism is well characterized by his views on geometry and arithmetic. What is

essential to his position is that the truths of mathematics are not considered to be necessary.

According to Mill, the only necessity is verbal necessity; as the truths of mathematics clearly

have more than just verbal input, they are thus not necessary. Thus the truths of geometry and

arithmetic are first and foremost empirical truths, the premises of which are established

inductively. Mathematical truths and principles are not mind-independent objects existing

outside space-time, but inductive empirical generalizations of the world around us. This way,

the most direct way of defining the, say, the concept of number, would be to look into the

psychological procedures that are responsible for the establishment of the such a concept. A

number, according to Mill, is thus nothing other but a collection of objects, that we generalize

over and name as being, say, “two” (Mill: 1843, 56).

Mill’s approach was important both to the more general further developments of

psychologism in the German speaking academia and to Husserl’s position in particular.

Husserl quotes and criticizes Mill’s account on more than one occasion and takes it as one of

the extreme ends of a faulty definition of the concept of number (the other is Frege’s)

(Husserl: 2003, 169-171). His central critical remarks bring to mind that of Frege’s, namely if

we consider numbers to be created through by an empirical observation of the numerical

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predicates of multiplicities, we are left without a proper account of neither the objectivity of

numbers, nor their necessity. Here Husserl fully agrees with Frege in saying that “numbers

are not heaps of objects” (Frege:1970, 8).

Husserl’s criticism of Mill may be quite telling of his own position and more than

that, it again shows how vastly Frege misinterpreted him by claiming that Husserl intends

“everything to be shunted off into the subjective” (ibid., 9). Husserl’s views of Mill’s

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 treatment of number concepts shows that he is not only aware of this but that he agrees with

Frege and that he clearly intends number concepts to belong to the realm of objectivity.

Another significant influence on Husserl’s early thought was the teachings of

Wilhelm Wundt, with whom he worked in Leipzig and Berlin. Wundt is often credited to be

the father of experimental psychology and the publication of his Principles of Physiological

Psychology (1902) marks the birth of psychology as an independent discipline. What is

mentioned more rarely is that Wundt primarily held a chair in philosophy. This should come

as no shock as the majority of the end of the XIX century psychologists originally had

positions in philosophy departments. It was often seen, that merging philosophy with

psychology will give philosophy authority as it will make it more “scientific”, this way

making philosophical research more credible.

As Martin Kusch notes, the most characteristic feature of Wundt’s views was that

“the days when philosophy would figure as the foundation of the natural and of the human

sciences were gone; instead philosophy was to be based on the results of these sciences”

(Kusch: 1995, 127). However, it is important to note, that philosophy was not seen as

something that should lose its meaning or should be considered a doomed venture all

together. Instead Wundt saw it as a union of the various branches of science: “[whereas the

various approaches] separate knowledge into a great number of individual objects of

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knowledge, the eye of philosophy is directed from the start towards the interrelation between

all these objects of knowledge” (Wundt: 1902, 48).

Along with Wundt’s Principles, another essential text of German psychologism was

Brentano’s Psychology from and Empirical Standpoint (1874). However, it is interesting to

note, that Brentano, though a self-proclaimed psychologist, was much more interested in

philosophical issues of epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of mind than empirical

psychology, which was much more Wundt’s focus. In deed, by 1886 in his letter to Stumpf

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 Brentano notes: “I am now completely a metaphysician and I must confess that after having

been a psychologist for a couple of years I’m glad of the change” (Stumpf: 1976, 16). And, as

David Bell notes, although Husserl was undoubtedly interested in Brentano’s work in

psychology, what influenced him most was “distinctively philosophical discipline which

Brentano liked to call ‘descriptive psychology’, or ‘psychognosy’, or sometimes ‘descriptive

phenomenology’ (Bell: 1990, 6).

It is important to note that neither Brentano nor Husserl considered descriptive

psychology to be an empirical research. It is much better characterized as belonging to

philosophy of mind, for it primarily is concerned not with contingent generalizations but with

a priori truths and this sets the tone of Husserl’s thought. In deed, hints of Husserl’s

dissatisfaction of introduction of Mill’s radical empiricism to the definition of the essence of

number can already be found in Brentano, who claims on more than one occasion that the

laws of psychology yield in inductively based generalizations which will be contingent and

only probabilistic:

[There are] two factors which prevent us from acquiring the exact conception
of the highest laws of mental succession: first, they are only empirical laws
dependent upon the variable influences of unexplored physiological presences;
secondly, the intensity of mental phenomena cannot be subjected to
measurement. (Brentano: 1874, 70).
Brentano’s approach, on the other hand, is aimed at the a priori, “it’s results are

‘exact’, ‘apodictic’ and ‘self-evident’, and it arrives at the laws immediately: ‘at one stroke’,
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‘without induction’ (Bell: 1990, 6). Thus Brentano’s psychologism, much in the same way as

Husserl’s, does not exclude the existence of ideal objects, knowledge of which may be a

priori. This is well illustrated by Brentano’s famous dictum: “My psychological standpoint is

empirical; experience alone is my teacher. Yet I share with other thinkers the conviction that

this is entirely compatible with a certain ideal point of view” (Brentano: 1874, 3).

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 4. CONTEMPORARY APPLICATIONS
OF MATHEMATICAL INTUITION

4.1. Mathematical Intuition Today: New Horizons, Old Distinctions

Contemporary philosophical approaches to intuition differ to the extent that “it is not

at all clear that those who defend the idea of mathematical intuition, and those who attack it,

have the same concept in mind” (Parsons: 2008, 139). However it is interesting to note, that

the main divergence, at least in the way intuition’s role has been perceived in the last one

hundred years of philosophy of mathematics, can already be found in the Descartes and

Kant’s differing conceptions, which have been sketched above.

The crucial differences may be summarized in the following fashion: those who

belong the Cartesian tradition (i) see intuition as an ability that puts the cognizer in direct

contact to mathematical objects; (ii) intuition is defined as the “mind’s eye”, namely as

something that allows us to see clearly and distinctly ‘see’ that, say, a certain mathematical

proposition is true; (iii) the Cartesian conception of intuition need not be grounded in

sensation, it need not have any empirical input, say as a concrete perception or imagination.

This use of intuition is present in the work of, among others, Kurt Gödel and, to some extent,

Penelope Maddy.
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The Kantian tradition is most thoroughly argued for in the works of Charles Parsons.

These views can be characterized by negating the first and the third theses of the Cartesians:

(i) intuition does not put the cognizer into a direct contact with mathematical objects; (ii)

intuition is primarily grounded in perception, either direct or imaginary. However, these

characterizations do not necessarily contradict each other. Someone who defends the Kantian

view, may as well accept the Cartesian definition of intuition, however insisting that these

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 types of intuition answer to, say, different mathematical propositions or have generally

different tasks.

The context in which mathematical intuition is applied is however different from that

of Descartes’ or Kant’s times. While it has always figured in issues dealing with immediate

and non-discursive knowledge whatever ontology the proponent has accepted, today it is

primarily seen in the context of mathematical Platonism. More precisely, it is used as means

in answering the epistemic issues arising from Benacerraf’s dilemma. The dilemma first

sketched in Benacerraf’s influential article “Mathematical Truth”, roughly summarized, states

that no interpretation of mathematical truth encompasses both a coherent semantics and

epistemology. Put in other words, if the interpretation of mathematical truth satisfies the

requirements of a homogenous semantical theory, “in which the semantics for the statements

of mathematics parallel the semantics for the rest of the language” (Hale, Wright: 2006, 1), it

will clash with a reasonable epistemology.

What Benacerraf takes to be “a coherent semantical theory” is the classical

correspondence theory of truth, best formulated in the works of Alfred Tarski. According to

Tarskian interpretation, propositions are true in virtue of their reference to the corresponding

objects. Therefore the semantical horn of the dilemma is formulated as follows:

(S) Any theory of mathematical truth [ought to] be in conformity with a

general theory of truth […] which certifies that the property of sentences that
the account calls ‘truth’ is indeed truth. (Benacerraf: 1973, 408)
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However just how should we think of the mathematical objects that such propositions

are to refer to? It is generally taken that if there exist any abstract mathematical objects, they

are ideal, existing outside space-time and thus causally inert. How then are we, physical

beings existing entirely in space-time, supposed to merge any contact with these objects?

Namely, if what guarantees the truth of mathematical propositions is utterly inaccessible to

us, how can we say that we know any of these propositions? Thus Benacerraf formulates the

epistemological horn of the dilemma:

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 (E) A satisfactory account of mathematical truth […] must fit into an over-all
account of knowledge in a way that makes it intelligible how we have the
mathematical knowledge that we have. An acceptable semantics of
mathematics must fit and acceptable epistemology (Benacerraf: 1973, 409)
It is not difficult to see how this dilemma threatens both Nominalist and Platonist

approaches. Proponents of Nominalism will have no problem explaining how we may have

an unproblematic epistemology, since distinct, mind-independent mathematical objects are

banned from their ontology. However, in order to answer the semantic horn of the dilemma,

they will have to reject Tarskian semantics and come up with a new way of establishing the

truth conditions of mathematical propositions that would also be satisfactory outside the

scope of mathematical language.

A mathematical Platonist then has to deal with a problem of explaining just how are

we supposed to access and thus have knowledge of such mathematical objects. One way to

account for this access has been by way of the application of mathematical intuition. What

this strategy will involve is either the claim that (i) human beings have a special cognitive

faculty that allows for the grasping of abstract mathematical objects and in this way puts the

cognizer in direct contact with such objects (Cartesian intuition); or, somewhat more

modestly, (ii) that intuition enables the recognition of concepts, however it does not put the

cognizer in direct contact with the objects themselves (Kantian intuition).

It is generally taken that the first instance on the application of intuition to the access
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problem is found in the work of Kurt Gödel. Gödel claims that we gain knowledge of

mathematical objects in much the same way as we gain knowledge of concrete objects, that

is, by experiencing them in a certain way. This ‘experience of mathematical objects’ is

precisely what Gödel considers to be mathematical intuition. Just as we perceive and

experience concrete objects as actually present and true, we intuit mathematical objects as

both actually present and true. Gödel writes:

But, despite their remoteness from sense-experience, we do have something

like a perception of the objects of set theory, as is seen from the fact that the

30
 axioms force themselves upon us as being true. I don’t see any reason why we
should have less confidence in this kind of perception, i.e. in mathematical
intuition, than in sense-perception. (Gödel: 1964, 271).
How does intuition have access to such objects remains a controversial aspect of

Gödelian exegesis, though it is generally taken that Gödel considered our minds to be of the

same nature as the abstract mathematical objects, namely immaterial. Thus the claim that

mathematical objects are somehow epistemically suspicious simply rests on a faulty and

overly naturalistic conception of the mind.

Gödel’s view has been criticized by many, to the extent that it has now become more

of a piece of philosophical mythology than a legitimate position. Among the many issues one

may have with Gödel’s use of intuition, perhaps the most prominent ones are the following.

Firstly, Gödel’s proposal is committed to an radical version of mind-body dualism. Since

Gödel is defending a version of mathematical intuition where the contact with the objects in

question is direct, he assumes that our minds are such that they have the ability to come into

contact with entities of the Platonic realm, and thus themselves must be immaterial and

located outside space-time. It seems extremely difficult to defend such a picture of the mind,

and a very few Platonist are ready to pay such a great price for the answer of the access

problem. The second problem is that even if one agreed with the dualism Gödel’s view

entails, his proposal does not seem to solve the access problem but rather postpone it. One

may be fully justified in asking just how it is the case that our immaterial mind comes into
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contact with mathematical objects. Merely postulating the faculty of intuition does not seem

to be helpful, for the lack of access problem still remains unanswered.

In the light of these and other criticisms, the contemporary use of mathematical

intuition has taken a different turn. The new approach my be best characterized by claiming

that “we posses a psychological apparatus whose only ultimate sources of information are the

naturalistic sources of perception and introspection, but that nevertheless generates intuitive

31
 beliefs and thoughts about mathematical objects (or structures or patterns)” (Balaguer: 2001,

37).

The most prominent defender of such a conception of mathematical intuition is

Charles Parsons, though similar accounts have been given by Jerold Katz and Mark Steiner.

In addition to the latter, Stewart Shapiro and Michael Resnik have been proposing something

along the lines of a naturalized intuition, even though they prefer the term ‘abstraction’ over

‘intuition’. This naturalized version of intuition is generally considered to be taking

inspiration from Kant. However in what follows I will show that in its definition and

application it is closer to that of Husserl’s.

4.2. Parsons’ Application of Mathematical Intuition

I now turn the discussion of the parallels between Husserl and Parsons’ applications

of intuition. Insofar as Husserl anticipated an application of intuition, in the vein of Parsons,

his theory should be of interest to contemporary philosophy, and both the continuities and the

discontinuities between his and Parsons’ views may be quite telling.19

Parsons’ begins his article “Mathematical Intuition” with the claim that if

mathematical intuition is to be relevant to philosophy of mathematics, “it should play a role

like that of sense-perception in our knowledge in every day world and physics” (Parsons:

1980, 145). This way stating that the central feature of intuition is the analogy between sense
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perception as a cognitive relation to the physical world, and “something like a perception”

giving a similar relation to mathematical objects (Parsons: 1980, 145). Such intuition,

Parsons is convinced, will be very limited in scope, in the sense that it will only cover the

19It must however be mentioned that drawing parallels between Husserl and Parsons views on mathematical intuition has
been done before – most notably by Richard Tieszen, who has argued that Husserl’s notion of intuition can help Parsons
account for the difficulties his theory encounters when faced with potential infinities (Tieszen: 1984). However no work has
been done, either by Tieszen, Parsons or others to investigate the relation that Parsons’ view of intuition could bear to that of
early Husserl’s put forth in the PA, his only work devoted solely to philosophy of mathematics.

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 simplest cases of elementary geometry and arithmetic. Here I will focus mainly on his

conception of intuition of elementary arithmetical concepts.

The manner in which Parsons present the notion of intuition is quite akin to that of

Husserl’s, namely through providing a genetic analysis of the concept of number. However,

while in PA the use of intuition was evoked as a necessary condition for arriving to the

concept of number, in Parsons’ work we may note the reverse –the conditions in which we

grasp the concept of number are reconstructed as means to define and illuminate the use

mathematical intuition. However differing the motivations, in both of their works we may

find something of an explication of a priori conditions for our knowledge of elementary

mathematical concepts.

Contrary to Husserl, Parsons, while focusing mainly on epistemological issues, does

not leave ontological considerations aside. At the very least, they are required to see what

exactly does intuition provide access to–concrete objects, abstract or some sort of

intermediary between the two?

Thus, a critical feature of his project is a three-level ontology, the constituents of

which are purely concrete (physical level), quasi-abstract (conceptual level) and purely

abstract objects (the objects in the Platonic Heaven). The objects of mathematical intuition

are the quasi-concrete, while abstract objects are taken to be causally inert and thus not
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accessible by any of our epistemic faculties. This is why we cannot have an intuition of

natural numbers, however we can have intuitions of quasi-abstract structures that represent

the numbers.

A way to understand the distinction better is to see the quasi-concrete objects as a

certain structure of concepts and concrete objects as instantiations of parts of that structure. A

good illustrative example of this is Hilbert’s conception of finitary mathematics. Hilbert,

similarly to Husserl and Parsons, asserts that there is a body of elementary mathematical

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 objects that are known to us intuitively, namely, immediately. Furthermore, Hilbert insists

that the existence of such primitive and intuitively known objects is necessary, for they are

the underlying conditions of any sort of higher-order reasoning (see Hilbert: 2002, 376).

Parsons, following Hilbert, considers such objects to be strings of strokes that he calls

types, while the concrete instances of the types are tokens and are understood as objects

given to us in concrete perception. What makes up a type is a special geometrical form

composed of strokes. According to Parsons, purely abstract entities, such as numbers, are

defined by types. Thus if I wanted to define elementary natural numbers in this language, I

could say that 1 is defined by a type that has the form of |, 2 is a type that has the form of ||, 3

is a type that has the form of |||, etc. I can recursively generate greater and greater numbers by

the process of repetition.

By perceiving a concrete token of the type (say two cats on the fence) the cognizer

intuits its type (||). Therefore the role of intuition is, roughly put, to immediately connect

some object of perception, a concrete token, with a concept of a type20 – to make the form of

the type immediately clear.

Though Husserl discusses the role of intuition in the formation of the concept of

number in much more detail than Parsons, paying careful attention to the processes that come

parallel to intuition (as collective combination and alike), in both of their approaches intuition
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is defined in the same fashion. It is a cognitive process that is essential for the acquisition of

elementary mathematical objects. In both of their uses of the term intuition puts the agent into

a direct cognitive relationship with an intuited object or, in the case of Husserl, a property of

a certain object.

Furthermore, Parsons’ use of intuition is much closer to Husserl’s than that of Kant’s.

While, as was indicated previously, Kant uses intuition to designate both immediate

20 See (Parsons: 1980, 103)

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 cognition and a singular representation, the latter is much more prominent in his

epistemology. We may note the reverse in Husserl and Parsons –intuition is understood

almost exclusively as immediate cognition, and very rarely used to designate a singular

representation.

For Kant intuition is a necessary condition for knowledge of any mathematical

objects. Husserl and Parsons, on the other hand, apply it only to a very limited body of

mathematical objects. Both Husserl and Parsons are convinced that it simply is implausible to

assume that intuition will be applicable to objects that are too complex to be perceived.

Therefore, Husserl evokes the notion of inauthentic concepts of number, namely those that

are not directly experienced and thus not given by perceptual intuition. Parsons makes this

point very clear with his criticism of Maddy’s application of intuition to set theory (Parsons:

2007, 167) where he states that set theory is too complex and relies too heavily on non-

empirical observations to be an object of mathematical intuition.

All that said, I do not intend to claim that Husserl and Parsons’ use of intuition is

identical. Parsons’ evocation of the term is much more nuanced and does not commit itself to

such counterintuitive claims as Husserl’s insistence that the only true mathematical

knowledge we have is that of elementary mathematical concepts and those that can be traced

back to such concepts. In this respect, Husserl can be seen as advocating a crude and early
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version of causal theory of knowledge. The main assumption behind such a view is that in

order for some belief to be considered knowledge it has to be properly caused by a truly

existing object or state of affairs which the belief addresses. The only proper mathematical

knowledge that we can have is that which is caused by the perceivable objects that our beliefs

are about, such as a collection of countable items and alike.

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 Many contemporary epistemologists and philosophers of mathematics are skeptical

towards this view21. Among other reasons, it cannot account for a body a priori propositions

that we plausibly consider to be knowledge. Parsons is thus cautious not to commit himself to

such views, stating explicitly that his evocation of intuition does not imply an account for all

mathematical knowledge (Parsons: 2007, 152).

However, setting this difference aside, I think it is plausible to assume that Husserl

nevertheless anticipated the conception and application of mathematical intuition, in the vein

of Parsons. It is not in Kant’s or Gödel’s but in Husserl’s early work that we find the first

explicit articulation of the relevance of mathematical intuition to the knowledge of

elementary mathematical concepts in a sufficiently similar way to the contemporary use of

the term.
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21
Among others see Collier (1973, 350-352).
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 5. HUSSERL’S CONCEPTION OF MATHEMATICAL INTUITION
AND THE CONTEMPORARY DEBATES

5.1. Husserl and the Access Problem

It is often asserted that Husserl’s main philosophical objective throughout his career

was to unite two competing assumptions about knowledge: (i) knowledge involves ideal

objects; (ii) knowledge can only arise from experience.22 This resonates well with the access

problem, which, as we have seen, can be put in similar terms. If Husserl is addressing this

issue already in PA, relating his use of intuition to the contemporary debates becomes even

more plausible, as we can then claim that Husserl, in part, applies intuition to answer the

access challenge similarly to some contemporary platonists.

To see whether Husserl’s application of intuition could be at all useful to the access

challenge, we must begin with the question of his ontological commitments in PA. This is a

burdensome task, especially given that nowhere does Husserl fully state his stance on the

issue; one rather has to reconstruct it from controversial hints found all throughout the book.

The primary question here is: did Husserl consider numbers to be ideal in any sense of the

term?

It is tempting to interpret him as stating that numbers are crafted through counting,
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and thus are abstract only in the sense that they are generalizations over physical objects.

This is a popular interpretation for several reasons. Firstly, it is given in Frege’s influential

review of PA, which I discussed in section two of this paper. Secondly, the very nature of

Husserl’s inquiry would suggest this kind of reading. After all, the inquiry into the concept of

number should address the essence of number, a supposedly abstract and objective entity, not

merely a description of the conditions in which we grasp the concept. Therefore, Husserl’s

22
Among others see Bell (1990, 23), De Boer (1978, 12), Miller (1982, 89-100).

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 definition, at least on the face of it, suggests that the concept of number is a psychical entity,

as he calls it following Brentano, without any further connections to the objective realm. The

closest he comes to objectivity, as we have already seen, is by calling a number “something”,

an object that we have abstracted away from all of its particulars:

If this designation [i.e. number] is to a have a genuine basis, then it

must reside in the characteristic common to each and every one of
those contents. But there is only one all-encompassing concept -
that of the something. (Husserl: 2003, 123)
However the vast majority of early Husserl scholars tend to see his early work in a

different light.23 According to, for example, Dallas Willard, despite “the many confusions of

thought and language [in Husserl’s] earlier works, he never thought that number and the laws

of number were in any usual sense of the word “psychical”’ (Willard: xxvii). According to

Willard, Husserl’s formation of the concept of number points at “on-reaching, higher order

intentionality carrying over to the totality of whatever things are being counted, that totality

not being the part of the act or dependent for its nature or existence upon the act” (Willard:

2003. xvii). Thus Willard holds that the term ‘psychic’ was rather an “incredibly misfortunate

choice of phrasing” (ibid.) than an actual conviction of Husserl’s.

It may also be the case that Husserl simply takes it to be a matter of fact that our

knowledge of numbers is knowledge of abstract objects, in one or the other sense of the term.

Husserl’s prose can be frustratingly obscure, as he seldom offers clear and sharp distinctions
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and definitions, however if we are careful to distinguish mental acts and objects towards

which they are directed, it is clear that he does not intend number concepts to be subjective

representations. Neither does he consider mathematics to be an extension of psychology,

what Frege has famously accused him of.

Furthermore, that Husserl was taking some sort of a realist stance can be also inferred

from his harsh criticisms of nominalist approaches to mathematics. For example, he writes:

23
Among others see, Bell (1990, 59), Tieszen (1994, 97-99), Miller (1982, 89-100).

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 “nominalism loses both concept and essence, and has no way of elucidating the relationship

of symbols to that which they represent” (Husserl: 2003, 179). However what sort of realism

was Husserl actually advocating by the time of writing PA remains a mystery.

The vast majority of early Husserl scholars are inclined to claim that already by the

time of PA Husserl was a full blown Platonist. However this interpretation seems to take its

force not from actual textual evidence from either PA, nor texts written around that time,

neither from the positions of those who influences Husserl, but from the fact that Husserl

later in his career argues for radical Platonism, thus, for some reason we should also assume

that he is a Platonist in PA. This, among others, is the position of Claire Ortiz-Hill (Ortiz-

Hill: 2000, 95), Guillermo Rosaddo Haddock (Haddock: 200, 199) and Richard Tieszen’s

(Tieszen: 1994, 99). In what follows I will discuss two possible interpretations of early

Husserl’s ontological commitments in relation to the access problem –the first one being that

of full-blown Platonism, and the other that of critical realism, in the vein of Kant and

Brentano.

5.2. Husserl as a Full-Blown Platonist: Between Maddy and Parsons

Tieszen has argued that not only does Husserl intend number concepts to be objective

by the time of writing PA, he means them to be purely abstract entities existing outside

space-time (Tieszen: 1994, 98-100). He grounds his interpretation by claiming that we should
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see Husserl’s work in PA as an attempt to provide a genetic analysis of the concept of

number. This sort of analysis takes up a crucial part of Husserl’s later philosophy, and he

famously mentions the relevance of it in “The Origin of Geometry” (Husserl: 1973), stating

that task of a genetic account of arithmetic will be to explain how we may have knowledge of

ideal objects, namely those located outside space time. Thus, Tieszen’s claims, since the

method in PA is sufficiently similar to his later works, where the notion of genetic analysis is

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 fully formulated, we ought to conclude that he indeed considers numbers to be ideal objects

and that he is attempting to give an answer to the question of how we come to know them.

Therefore, Tieszen continues, Frege’s criticism was utterly misguided since Husserl was

already a full-blown Platonist by the time of writing PA, as he clearly intends numbers to be

“outside space-time, immutable and acausal” (ibid, 98).

This certainly was Husserl’s position in LI, where he insists that there is a crucial

difference between concrete instances of numbers and numbers as ideal objects:

It is… evident that when I say ‘Four’ in the generic sense, as, e.g., in the
statement ‘Four is a prime number relatively to seven’, I am meaning the
species Four, I have it before my logical regard, and am passing judgment on
it, and not on anything individual. I am not judging about any individual group
of four things (Husserl: 2001, 239)
Numbers are not localized in space and time, they are ‘timeless unities’ (ibid. 240),

however we who intend them and have them intuitively present are located in space and time

(Miller: 1982, 90). Husserl goes on to argue that the being of such ideal objects and

knowledge of them can be illuminated only through a phenomenological inquiry, the project

of which indeed has its headwaters in PA. Having this in mind it is not difficult to see how an

interpretation such as Tieszen’s may seem plausible. If the only substantial difference

between his early and later period is the changing of the term descriptive psychology to

phenomenological analysis, why not assume that he was a full blown Platonist already by the

time of writing PA.

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If Husserl indeed considers number to be ideal objects, his views on intuition might

bring to mind not only the views of Charles Parsons but also those of Penelope Maddy.

Maddy’s theory in a nutshell is this: we have knowledge of abstract mathematical entities

because we are causally connected to them by direct sense perception. If Gödel’s strategy

was to show how our minds could ascend to the Platonic realm, Maddy attempts to show how

the abstract entities could descend to the physical realm. Maddy’s main focus is on sets, and

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 her claim is that sets are spatio-temporally located and that knowledge of them is given to us

by perceptual intuition.

A spatio-temporally located set is any aggregate of objects that I can perceive (either

by direct perception or by imagination); by perceiving a stack of three books I grasp by

intuition that it is a set containing three elements. Intuition here is understood as a hybrid of

that of Kant and Gödel’s: perception is necessary for it, but it puts us in direct contact to

mathematical object, not merely our representations of them. We could see Husserl as

painting a similar picture: by perceiving a concrete collection of objects I come to know, by

way of intuition, that a certain numerical property, which is also considered as a

mathematical object of sorts, can be attributed to them.

The most urgent objection that can be raised to Maddy’s theory and to which she does

not seem to have a clear answer is this: once we bring the objects of mathematics into space-

time, we seem to be left without a natural account of what certain mathematical objects are

supposed to be. A good example of this problem is an infinite set. If Maddy’s views are to

have any plausibility, she should be able to demonstrate how we have knowledge of sets that

we cannot perceive or which cannot exist in a finite universe.

Furthermore one may ask whether she needs to be a Platonist in the first place. She

writes: “On some terminological conventions, this means that sets no longer count as

‘abstract’. So be it; I attach no importance to them”(Maddy: 1980, 59). If, as Maddy claims,
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we can have unproblematic knowledge of entities such as sets via perception, why take a

Platonist stance in the first place? However if Maddy’s view omits Platonism, it is in danger

of collapsing into John Stuart Mill’s proposal to see sets as nothing but aggregates of physical

matter. Mill’s view has been famously criticized for many reasons, but the two which apply

most readily to Maddy are the following: a set has a determinate number of members, an

aggregate does not; second, it is impossible to distinguish an aggregate of 3 elements from

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 the “aggregate” containing that aggregate, but it is very important to distinguish a set from a

set containing that set.

At first glance, it seems that these criticisms would be equally applicable to Husserl.

Intuition of numbers understood as aggregates of units does seem to come very close to

intuition of sets in Maddy’s sense. However here again we are left in confusion, for nowhere

does Husserl explicitly connect set theory with the concept of number. If it happens to be the

case that Husserl is merely talking about cardinalities of aggregates, then the problems that

Maddy has to deal with are not applicable to his view, for such problems largely stem from

axioms of set theory.

On the other hand, if it happens that Husserl is modeling his account of numbers on

set theory, he can at least account for the first challenge, namely that we cannot perceive an

infinite set. Husserl’s account seems to be preferable to Maddy’s, in that it does not hold that

direct perceptual experience is always a necessary condition for the knowledge of numbers.

As we have seen from Husserl’s discussion of symbolic representation, direct perceptual

knowledge of numbers is strictly limited, and knowledge of number concepts that are more

complex is arrived at by my recognition that the number belongs to the algebraic system that

rests on the authentic number concepts. This allows for symbolic representations of

authentically acquired concepts of numbers and manipulations of them. Thus Husserl’s

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answer to the challenge would simply be that it is impossible to grasp an infinite set through

perceptual intuition.

Thus, if Husserl is a full-blown Platonist, he could be seen as answering the access

problem in a vaguely Maddian way –namely, by postulating that we are causally connected to

abstract entities –without succumbing to all of the problems which plague Maddy’s theory.

Seen in this light, Husserl’s answer to the access problem is that we are causally connected at

least with the abstract formal properties of multiplicities, and thus we have knowledge of

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 elementary arithmetical concepts via perceptual intuition. All the greater numbers are built

out of these authentic representations, and we know them in virtue of knowing the elementary

numbers.

However how sufficiently does this answer the access problem? Husserl may

successfully avoid the issues that Gödel and Maddy struggled with –he neither has to defend

a strong version of mind-body dualism, nor does his theory presuppose an intuition-based

account of large numbers that simply cannot be given to us by way of perceptual intuition.

But, if he indeed is a Platonist, he needs to explain how numbers as formal properties

truthfully describe the aggregates to which they correspond. If we consult the rules of

standard Platonist views, this ought to be done by reference to some purely abstract objects or

properties that correspond, however how do we access them, remains as unclear.

This should not be taken as merely an issue with Husserl’s approach. Charles Parsons

has to deal with a similar problem. As we have seen, there is one crucial difference which

makes Parsons’ theory more plausible than that of Gödel: there is no direct link between the

physical and the Platonic realm, only between concrete and quasi-abstract entities. This way

Parsons, among other things, does not have to commit himself to strong dualism, as Gödel

would.

But if this is the end of the story, we may be left with a lingering worry, namely that
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the access to the Platonic realm is still left unaccounted for. Parsons theory of mathematical

intuition shows in what way we could have knowledge of quasi-abstract entities, but that is

where the application of intuition stops. What about the abstract entities? The furthest

Parsons goes in defining natural numbers qua abstract objects is to say that they are “a

structure satisfying the Dedekind-Peano axioms” (Parsons: 2007, 188), but just how the

abstract structure is related to the quasi-abstract mathematical objects remains unclear.

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 Here Parsons’ ingenious strategy of introducing quasi-abstract objects might backfire.

If no adequate explanation of more direct access is given, then the faculty of intuition is no

help at all in answering the question of how is contact with the Platonic Heaven forged. All

that the application of intuition does is show how we can have immediate knowledge of fairly

unproblematic elementary mathematical concepts.

I think what has been discussed points to much larger problems of applying intuition

to Platonism than just inadequacies in the approaches discussed. What is common to the

views of Husserl (interpreted as a full-blown Platonist), Maddy and Parsons is that it cannot

be shown how it would be even remotely plausible that intuition has contact to the third

realm. At most they demonstrate how we manage to connect concrete particulars with their

corresponding concepts.

5.4. Critical Realism

However, if Husserl is a critical realist, as opposed to a full blown-Platonist, we may

see him as addressing the access problem in a different light. Despite the wide spread

conviction that Husserl was a Platonist by the time of writing PA, this interpretation is not

supported by much textual evidence. While it is true that Husserl turns to Platonism in

Logical Investigations and spells it our very clearly, there is no mention of his ontological

stance in PA.
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In this respect, Tieszen’s reference to “The Origins of Geometry” may turn out to be

misguiding. First of all, it is a piece written long after the publication of Logical

Investigations, namely after Husserl’s embrace of Platonism. While the issue of the

possibility of arithmetical knowledge discussed in “The Origins of Geometry” resonates with

the general topical direction of PA, why should we conclude that Husserl had the same

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 position in both of the works, especially given that there is no mention of PA in “The Origins

of Geometry”?

In the light of these suspicions, in what follows I will outline another possible

interpretation of Husserl’s ontological commitments, one that is in the vein of critical realism

of Kant and Brentano. I do not mean to suggest that it is necessarily the right one. Just as

there is no mention of full-blown Platonism in PA, there is no mention of critical realism.

However, as it fits the project equally well as the Platonist interpretation it deserves a

mention.

The first and perhaps most important similarity between Kant and Husserl’s thought

is the role intuition plays in both of their epistemology and their respective views in

philosophy of mathematics. As I have already mentioned earlier on, central to Kant’s

epistemology is the claim that our ability of sensation imposes the forms of space (the form

of everything that is outside us) and time (the form of all intuitable objects) on the objects of

our intuitive awareness. This is to say that we cannot ever perceive the pure objects in

themselves, because our cognitive capacities are such that they will always impose, among

other things, the forms of time and space on our perceptions.

In relation to this, another relevant feature of Kant’s epistemology, as we have seen in

the previous chapter, is the view that any concept is given to us by means of sensation, thus,
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in order to give a thorough analysis of a certain concept we will inevitably have to touch

upon the conditions under which knowledge of such a concept is arrived to. What follows

from these two ideas is that talk of these concepts outside the scope of our representations of

them is impossible.

These two claims are the kernel of Kantian constructivism, which, roughly

summarized, is the claim that the concepts that we attribute to the objects in our experience

cannot describe them directly. Their meanings are rather determined by the nature of our

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 cognitive faculties. What someone who defends such a thesis will inevitably have to address

is just how are concepts then constructed. Kant’s answer to this is the theory of the

schematism of pure concepts of understanding (Schematismus der reine Verstandsbegriffe).

Following Klaus Jorgensen, we may summarize Kant’s analysis of our knowledge of

concepts by two theses: (i) there is a harmony between the pure concepts of understanding

and the way appearances are given to us. This harmony ensures that appearances can be

cognized under categories; (ii) it is due to the schematism that such categorization of

appearances is possible (Jorgensen: 2006, 2). The schematism of the intellect may thus be

understood as the rule that determines how a particular is related to a concept. Intuition here

could be interpreted as the process that immediately relates the particular to such a rule.

Transcendental schemata are created through “imagination in relation to time”,

namely by perceiving certain regularities in time, the cognizer forms the rules by which sense

impressions will get attributed to concepts. An illustrative example of this notions is number,

which, according to Kant, is a transcendental schema of quantity. In CPR Kant writes:

But the pure schema of magnitude [quantitatis], as the concept of

understanding, is number. Which is a representation that binds together the
successive addition of one thing to another (of the same kind). Thus, number
is nothing other than the unity of the synthesis of the manifold of a
homogenous intuition in general, a unity which comes about through the fact
that I engender time itself in the apprehension of the intuition. (Kant: 1999,
273, 144/B180)
A possible Kantian interpretation of Husserl’s work by now may have become
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apparent. Husserl’s insistence on the claim that no concept is given to us without a basis in

concrete representation resonates with Kant’s idea that all possible concepts are given to us

by means of sensibility which is governed by the forms of time and space, and thus it is

impossible to refer to an object in its pure form. Therefore if we asked how knowledge of

ideal objects, such as authentic number concepts, is possible, Husserl may respond by saying

that it is possible only inasmuch we can trace it back to the concrete representations in which

numerical judgments appear.

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 A critical realist would agree with the Platonist that mathematical objects are not only

objective but wholly real, however they would disagree over the question of how we may

have knowledge of them. Namely, a Platonist strategy will be targeted to showing how we

come to direct contact with mathematical objects, while a critical realist would claim that we

never have direct contact with objects themselves, just with their representations that are

determined by our epistemological makeup.

However just how plausible would it be to state that Husserl was, if not a Kantian per

se, then at least some sort of a critical realist? One potentially damaging consideration needs

to be mentioned: Husserl is quite unsympathetic to Kant’s treatment of number concepts

throughout PA, which follows directly from Kant’s ontological commitments.

While critically examining the approaches to the concept of number that are relying

on Kant’s temporal succession argument, he claims that the fact that such an approach is

popular is more of a “consequence of the authority of his [Kant’s] name than […] of the force

of his argument” (Husserl: 22, 2003). Furthermore, Husserl harshly criticizes Kant’s notion

of number as a transcendental schema of quantity. He firstly points the equivocations in the

use of the term ‘schema’ in Kant’s work, and, more than anything, that the equation of

number with schema is irreconcilable with the function of the schema. For example: “We

wish to call […] the formal and pure condition of sensibility, to which the a concept of the

understanding is restricted in its use, the schema of that concept of understanding” (Kant
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B180); and “This representation […] of a general procedure of the imagination in giving a

concept its model [Bild] I call the schema [pertaining] to that concept” (ibid B 179-180).

Husserl then goes on to argue that if we wanted to carry this last definition unto the concept

of number then we would have to say “that a number is the general procedure of imagination

in giving to the concept of quantity its model. However, by ‘procedure’ can only be meant

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 the process of enumerating. But is it not clear that ‘number’ and ‘representation of

enumerating’ are not the same?” (Husserl: 2003, 34).

However in order to be a critical realist Husserl need not accept Kant’s philosophy of

arithmetic, nor every twist and turn of his epistemology. Indeed many of Husserl’s

contemporaries have criticized various aspects of Kant’s thought while still remaining

sympathetic, if with certain provisos, to his proposed ontology. An good example of such

views are those of Brentano, to whom PA is dedicated.

As Guillaume Frechette notes, in all of the criticisms Brentano has made against his

predecessors and contemporaries, “Kant undoubtedly occupies a place of honor” (Frechette:

2012, 1). One of Brentano’s most frequently stressed points is that Kant’s postulation of

synthetic a priori judgments is unjustified.24 He parallels Kant’s synthetic a priori judgments

with Reid’s judgments of common sense. Such judgments appear certain, though they are not

evident, and, according to, at least Kant, they form a foundation for science. What Brentano

could not agree with in Kant was not the a priori character of such statements, but the claim

that one cannot ‘see’ their evidence. Accepting such ‘blind’ judgments as the foundation of

all our knowledge is simply nonsensical, or so Brentano claims.

However this does not stop him from taking an ontological stance that draws

inspiration from that of Kant’s. The focus on Brentano’s study of ontology, much like Kant’s,
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is not on the things existing in themselves, but on things the way they are perceived by the

human eye. Which is to say that Brentano’s consideration will be of phenomenal objects, as

opposed to noumenal ones, to use Kant’s terminology. As Bell notes, a critical feature of

Brentano’s ontology is that the external, material world is bracketed, which is to say that

24
“In Germany it was Kant who undertook to save knowledge from Hume’s skepticism, and his method was in
essence very similar to that of Reid. Kant claimed that science demands as its foundations a number of
principles which he called synthetic a priori judgments. On close inspection of what he means by this, however,
it turns out that the term a priori amounts for him to proposition that stand for us as true from the beginning
without their being evident. The sum of a priori judgments have the same character as Reid’s judgments of
common sense” (Brentano: 1998, 99).

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 Brentano’s treatment of ontology has a pronounced solipsistic tendency; namely, “there is no

reference to, and no philosophical use of denizens of the natural world” (Bell: 1990, 9).

A critical distinction in Brentano’s ontology is drawn between physical and mental

phenomena. Mental phenomena are nothing but “acts which have content”,25 namely all

mental acts and activities, and physical phenomena are the contents of the said acts. When

introducing mental phenomena in Psychology from an Empirical Point of View Brentano

writes, “what is characteristic to mental phenomena is them having something immanently as

an object” (Brentano: 1874, 103). ‘Physical phenomena’ are thus used interchangeably with

‘immanent objects’, ‘contents’ or ‘intentional correlates’. As Barry Smith and Arkadiusz

Chrudzimski note, the most important aspect of the “immanence” of immanent objects is that

they are inseparable from the corresponding mental act, and in this sense the immanent object

is ‘in’ the mind (Chrudzimski, Smith: 2004, 205).

Physical phenomena thus, according to Brentano, ‘intentionally in-exist’ in mental

phenomena. Intentionality is another relevant feature of Brentano’s ontology, which can be

simply understood as the mental act’s necessary reference to an object. In Psychology from

an Empirical Standpoint he famously writes:

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the

Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) in-existence of an object, and
what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content,
direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a
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thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes

something as object within itself (Brentano: 1874, 88)
Regrettably, Brentano does not provide an explicit account of this relation, instead

merely giving examples and synonyms, such as ‘mental in-existence’, ‘immanent

objectivity’, ‘existence as an object in something’ and alike. It is important to note, that

Brentano often uses object and the content of a mental act interchangeably, for he uses both

to designate immanent content present in a mental act. External objects therefore are not

25
In Brentano’s terminology all mental phenomena are acts –he uses ‘mental phenomena’ and ‘mental act’
interchangeably.

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 talked about, as they are not phenomena, rather noumena, and, following Kant, cannot be

grasped in their original form.

We can thus safely say that Brentano’s ontology is that of a critical realist one. While

he departs considerably from Kant’s analysis of knowledge, and Kant’s partition of the

constituents of cognition, he remains faithful to the claim that we have no direct contact to

the objects themselves, save through the representations that are determined by our cognitive

faculties. Brentano does not give an account of the concept of number, as did Kant, however

if Husserl is a critical realist his account of number concepts would not go against the letter

of Brentano’s ontology. A brief sketch of such treatment of Husserl’s PA could be the

following: The grasping of the concept of number is an act/mental phenomenon, the number,

either per se, or distinct numerical property, is the immanent object of such an act, to which

the act is intentionally directed. Intuition may be understood as a fulfillment of an empty ‘act-

contents’, namely as something that makes the immanent object immediately present to the

mental phenomenon/act, this way yielding in our recognition of number concepts. By

extension, we may suppose then that Husserl, along with Brentano’s descriptive psychology,

might have adopted his critical realism as well. He would then be stating that mathematical

objects in whatever form they exist are real, however we may not reach them save through

the representations that yield from our epistemic makeup and that are to be analyzed by
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categorizing them into mental and physical phenomena.

However, whether this interpretation is more plausible than the afore mentioned one

remains an open question. Husserl’s early project is heavily influenced by Brentano’s work,

but we should be careful not to attribute Brentano’s ontology to PA without Husserl’s

consent. It is well known that Brentano was unsympathetic to Husserl’s LI precisely because

of Husserl’s ontological stance, this time explicitly Platonist. As Rollinger notes, he saw it as

“an affirmation of universals, sentences-in-themselves and other Undinge” (Rollinger: 1999,

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 43). However, from this we can hardly infer that Brentano agrees with Husserl’s ontology in

PA, without further elaborations on the matter, which, to the best of my knowledge, Husserl

never provided.

The same must be said about the Platonist interpretation: if the strongest support that

one can offer for a Platonist interpretation of early Husserl’s ontological commitments is that

he was a Platonist in LI, then we remain as much in the dark as we were before. Thus, both

approaches to Husserl’s early ontological commitments ought to treated as educated guesses,

and it would be near-impossible to establish the legitimacy of one over the other, at least at

this stage. Perhaps Husserl’s correspondence with Brentano, or Brentano’s own reflections on

the matter, could shed more light on this issue. But it remains to be seen whether even this

much could resolve the matter.

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 6. CONCLUSION

My intention in this thesis was to provide a thorough yet concise overview of

Husserl’s early philosophy of mathematics and argue that his early work can be interesting to

the contemporary philosopher. I hope to have shown that not only does Husserl define and

use mathematical intuition in a sufficiently similar way to the contemporary authors, he also

anticipates the application of it to the access problem. However, in just what way does he

apply intuition to the access problem remains yet to be determined. I have provided what I

take to be two most plausible interpretations, that of a Platonist and of a critical realist

ontology.

Needless to say not everything that deserved a mention found its way to this thesis. In

order to provide a concise yet critical interpretation, I needed to set certain considerations

aside for further research. For instance, a potentially relevant question might be what was

Husserl’s precise relation to the Neo-Kantian tradition and especially his teacher in Berlin,

Friedrich Paulsen. In a similar way, it may be important to see what was Husserl’s view on

Kant’s treatment of construction of concepts, namely what aspects does he agree with and

which ones does he criticize. As we have seen, in Husserl’s epistemological treatment of

numbers the cognizer is already equipped with number concepts, as intuition is supposed to
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account for the connection for the particular with its corresponding concept. However we are

very much left in the dark as to how the cognizer comes to have number concepts in the first

place.

As a final remark it must be mentioned, that here I tried to steer away from a more

critical assessment of whether intuition can be of much help for a Platonist (save from places

where the interpretation required it). I did this because what I saw as my primary task was to

show that there is more to early Husserl’s philosophy of math than just a target of Frege’s

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 criticism and headwaters of his phenomenological project. Ideas that are being developed in

Philosophy of Arithmetic are very much alive today and it is generally not recognized that

Husserl anticipated them. Determining to what extent are these ideas plausible is, again, a

matter of further research. However whatever the result of such an investigation, the fact

remains: Husserl’s early philosophy of mathematics not only deals with issues that are

relevant to the contemporary philosophy of mathematics, it does so in much the same way.
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53
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