SOURCE: A review of Dr. E. Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic, in Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, University of Notre Dame Press, 1977, pp. 314-24.

The following excerpt is a translation (by E. W. Kluge) of Frege's 1894 critical review of Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic, which played a significant role in causing Husserl to refocus the direction of his thought.

The author decides in the Introduction [of Philosophy of Arithmetic] that for the time being he will consider (only) cardinal numbers (cardinalia), and thereupon launches into a discussion of multiplicity, plurality, totality, aggregate, collection, set. He uses these words as if they were essentially synonymous; the concept of a cardinal number¹ is supposed to be different from this. However, the logical relationship between multiplicity and number (p. 9) remains somewhat obscure. If one were to go by the words “The concept of number includes the same concrete phenomena as the concept of multiplicity...