Abstract

Edmund Husserl’s understanding of personal communities as “personalities of a higher order” is controversial. He claims that these communities are intimately bound social groups that have their own memories and that they exhibit something like their own consciousness, self-consciousness, or self-awareness.1 For Husserl, PHO are communities of a “preeminent” or “outstanding” level, but it is not immediately clear what criteria to appeal to in understanding this preeminence.2 Interpretive disagreements on this topic suggest that there is an ambiguity in Husserl’s account. I argue, however, that Husserl’s account is not ambiguous on...