rewarding.
His presentation of the ideas of Bolzano, Dedekind,
Logic and Philosophy
of Mathematics in the Early
Husserl
by Stefania Centrone
DORDRECHT: SPRINGER, SYNTHESE LIBRARY 345, 2010, XXII + 232 PP.,
99.95 EUR, ISBN 978-90-481-3245-4
REVIEWED BY ROMAN KOSSAK
tefania Centrone’s book is a substantial scholarly
S contribution, addressed to philosophers and histori-
ans of logic. It touches on many points that are of
current interest in those areas. The 2011 issue of The New
Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy
devotes a review section to this book. My review has a different
character. As a working mathematician and an educator, I see
good reasons to seriously consider Husserl’s early views on the
foundations of mathematics. They seem quite relevant today.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was one of the most influ-
ential philosophers of the 20th century, the founder of
phenomenology. It is less well known that Husserl’s early
career was in mathematics. He studied under Leopold Kro-
necker and Karl Weierstrass, obtained his Ph.D. in Vienna in
1883 under Leo Königsberger, and then worked as an
assistant to Weierstrass in Berlin. Later, under the influence of
Franz Brentano, Husserl turned to psychology and soon after
to his own work in transcendental philosophy. His first book
Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investi-
gations, was published in 1891. In the foreword, Husserl
writes, ‘‘The task before us here is, rather: through patient
investigation of details, to seek reliable foundations, and to
test noteworthy theories through painstaking criticism, sep-
arating the correct from the erroneous, in order, thus
informed, to set in their place new ones which are, if possi-
ble, more adequately secured.’’ What follows is a fascinating
attempt to build the concepts of multiplicity (set) and num-
ber by detailed analysis of their psychological origins. The
guiding principle is that ‘‘No concept can be thought without
foundation in a concrete intuition.’’
Husserl’s goal was to move from (small) finite collections of
objects and the ‘‘authentic’’ (Husserl’s terminology) numbers,
representing their sizes, to the concepts of set and number in
general, symbolic representations of numbers, operations,
relations, and number systems, ending with the real continuum
and imaginary objects. The scenario is now familiar, but Husserl
approached it in deep and original ways. In the end he did not
succeed; to ground all mathematical developments in direct
psychological phenomena proved to be too much of a chal-
lenge. If we abstract, how is the process of abstracting justified?
If we derive more complicated statements from simpler ones,
where does the formal logic supporting the derivations come
from? Aware of the obstructions, Husserl dug deeper and
deeper, but a general foundation of mathematics did not
emerge. Despite that, reading Husserl today can be highly
Cantor, Frege, Leibniz, and other less-known mathematicians
and philosophers is impressively informative and insightful. He
is extremely critical, and some elements of this criticism could
be of great value now in teaching basic concepts of mathe-
matics. Husserl found mathematicians guilty of the zeal to
overdefine: ‘‘[…] it results from our analysis, with uncontestable
clarity, that the concepts of multiplicity and unity rest directly
upon ultimate, elemental psychical data, and consequently
belong to the concepts that are indefinable in the sense indi-
cated. But the concept of a number is so closely joined to them
that also in its case one can scarcely speak of any ‘defining.’ The
goal that Frege sets for himself must therefore be termed chi-
merical. It is therefore no wonder if his work, in spite of all
ingenuity, gets lost in super-subtleties and concludes without
positive results.’’ Remarks such as this – there are many – make
Philosophy of Arithmetic a very entertaining read, but overall
not an easy one. Centrone’s book is a perfect companion. She
provides clear explanations in modern terms for fragments
where Husserl’s language becomes obscure, and she provides
the necessary historical points of reference.
Centrone also presents Husserl’s other writings from 1891–
1901; the picture that emerges is very interesting. Husserl is fully
aware of all the developments in the foundations of mathematics
of that period. His work includes technical developments in the
concepts of algebraic systems, first-order logic, and the problem
of consistency in formal theories. Long before the work of
Church, Gödel, Kleene, and Tarski, Husserl came very close to
the concept of a computable function and to notions of a first-
order structure and its theory. In remarking on the nature of
operations on natural numbers, he seemed to anticipate the
incompleteness phenomena in arithmetic. The period just after
1901 is of particular interest. Husserl moved to Göttingen, where
he and Hilbert attended each other’s seminar lectures. Centrone
writes convincingly on similarities between Hilbert’s program
and Husserl’s early writings and lectures. In the conclusion she
writes: ‘‘A truly comprehensive account would confirm, or so we
believe, the late Husserl’s often repeated claim to be the father of
several important ideas that were subsequently adopted, with-
out acknowledgement, in the logical investigations of Hilbert’s
school. But this is a story for another occasion.’’
Frank Quinn (2012) writes about the state of mathe-
matics a century ago, ‘‘The main point of this article is not
that a revolution occurred, but that there are penalties for
not being aware of it.’’ Husserl’s early work is right at the
center of the mathematical revolution of the turn of the
19th century. Centrone’s book will make it much easier to
give a full account of what ‘‘really happened’’ then.
REFERENCE
Quinn, Frank (2012). A Revolution in Mathematics? What Really
Happened a Century Ago and Why It Matters Today. Notices of
the AMS, January 2012, pp. 32–37.
The CUNY Graduate Center
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e-mail: rkossak@gc.cuny.edu
 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, Volume 34, Number 3, 2012 81
DOI 10.1007/s00283-012-9291-2