*** Penultimate Draft. Forthcoming in A. Calcagno (ed.) Gerda Walther: Phenomenology of Sociality, Psychology and Religion. Springer. Please, quote from the published version *** Social Acts and Communities. Walther between Husserl and Reinach Alessandro Salice, University College Cork, Ireland Genki Uemura, Okayama University, Japan 1 Introduction It is almost a truism to claim that the mind is one of the core topics – if not the core topic – of research in phenomenology. And exploring the mind from a phenomenological perspective is to a great extent an investigation into the structures of experiences lived through by a singular subject. Among other results, the phenomenological approach to the mind has produced detailed descriptions of different kinds of experiences. One particularly important description concerns the distinction between what we suggest to label “infra-personal” and “social” experiences. Many of a subject’s experiences can be qualified as infra-personal. Among others, perceptions, beliefs, acts of imaginations, and (at least, some kinds of) emotions are infra-personal in the sense that they may involve, but do not necessarily require, the existence of other subjects. By contrast, and as a first approximation of a characterization, experiences of the social kind necessarily require the existence of other subjects in one way or the other, i.e., they require the subject to interact with others in a social environment. For instance, issuing an order always is issuing an order to somebody. And declaring war always is declaring war on behalf of a nation. The main question of this paper concerns the essential structure of social experiences: what does it mean, precisely, that these experiences require the subject to interact with others in a social environment? This paper reconstructs and scrutinizes the discussion about social experiences in early phenomenology. To be more precise, the paper is concerned with a specific class of social experiences, namely, social acts, and with two arguably irreconcilable positions thereof, which have been developed by two early phenomenologists. The first position, advocated by Adolf Reinach, holds that what characterizes an act as social is the peculiar way in which this act is addressed to another person or other persons (and hence has ‘addressee(s)’). The second position, defended by Gerda Walther, maintains that, for an act to qualify as social, this act must stand in the right relation with a community: the act must be performed in the name of or on the purpose of a community. Walther, who presents her view in an article of 1923, was certainly aware of Reinach’s theory, which leads to the question of why 1 The authors have equally contributed to this article. Uemura’s research is supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (KAKENHI, Project No. 26770014).