Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was a German-speaking philosopher, born in Proßnitz, Moravia, who trained first as a mathematician under Karl Weierstrass before turning to philosophy under Franz Brentano, from whom he absorbed the pivotal notion of intentionality, that consciousness is always consciousness of something.

He became the founder of phenomenology, the rigorous, presuppositionless study of the structures of lived experience as they present themselves to awareness. Rejecting both the psychologism that reduced logic to mental processes and the naturalism that treated mind as one more object in the world, Husserl insisted that the only secure starting point for knowledge is the field of conscious experience itself, examined from the first-person perspective.

From his early Logical Investigations (1900-1901) through the transcendental turn of Ideas (1913) and the late Cartesian Meditations (1931) and Crisis of the European Sciences (1936), Husserl refined a method built on the epoché, the deliberate bracketing of assumptions about the existence of the external world so that the essential structures of consciousness, intentionality, time-consciousness, and the lived-world (Lebenswelt) could be described directly.

He taught at Halle, Göttingen, and Freiburg, where his assistants and students, most notably Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger, carried phenomenology in new directions.

As a Jewish-born scholar he was stripped of academic privileges under the Nazi regime in his final years, yet his manuscripts, smuggled out and preserved, made him one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century.