Abstract

_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 2, pp 205 - 220 I investigate the phenomenological significance of Husserl’s appeal to the “numerical identity” of _irreality_ as it appears in recollected manifolds of lived-experience in his mature account of the transcendental constitution of transcendence and find it wanting. I show that what is at stake for Husserl in this appeal is the descriptive mark that exhibits the distinction between a unit of meaning as it is constituted in psychologically determined lived-experience and as it is constituted in lived-experience that is determined transcendentally. In other words, I show that numerical identity functions for Husserl as the criterion that signals transcendental psychologism has been overcome. I then present the argument that it has not been overcome in Husserl’s investigations, because the collective unity characteristic of numerical unity is presupposed by those investigations rather than made evidentially manifest and articulated.