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This essay is concerned with the question of how Husserl accounted in his Philosophy of Arithmetic ¹ for the aspect of wholeness of aggregates which are defined as being any collection of objects. It will be shown that Husserl's notion of "collective connection" is the key concept to be considered. The question: what kind of "thing" is such a collective connection, is answered: it is a meaning (Bedeutung). It may seem as if such an enterprise does not add substantially to the already existing literature which addresses itself to the problems of Husserl's first book. However, my interests do not lie in a new explication of what is considered to be Husserl's main fault in his early work: his psychologism. I am much more interested in showing that even if we ignore this question of Husserl's psychologism then (a) there remains still a large body of thought in the Philosophy of Arithmetic which forms the basis of Husserl's more mature thought; (b) there remains a certain problem which has nothing to do with Husserl's psychologism but which impairs his early analysis and is later removed; and (c) there remains a case which can be made against Husserl's acclaimed chapter XI, to the effect that it does not live up to the standards set in the earlier sections of his book. I do not know of any work on Husserl in which all of these claims are defended.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-9999-2_3

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