Phenomenology's founder began as a mathematician writing on the calculus of variations
Edmund Husserl earned his doctorate in mathematics and worked as assistant to the great Karl Weierstrass. Then Franz Brentano's lectures in Vienna convinced him to give his life to philosophy. The result was phenomenology, a method for studying experience itself that shaped much of twentieth-century thought.
Husserl was born in 1859 in Proßnitz, Moravia, now Prostějov in the Czech Republic, the second of four children of a Jewish milliner. He studied mathematics, physics and astronomy at Leipzig, where Wilhelm Wundt's philosophy lectures stirred him, then mathematics in Berlin under Leopold Kronecker and Weierstrass, finding a mentor in Tomáš Masaryk, later Czechoslovakia's first president. He completed a PhD in Vienna in 1883 under Leo Königsberger. In 1886, after reading the New Testament, he was baptised a Lutheran.
When Weierstrass fell ill, Husserl returned to Vienna and in 1884 heard Brentano, who introduced him to Bolzano, Lotze, Mill and Hume and is often seen as his biggest influence, especially on intentionality, the directedness of consciousness toward objects. He moved to Halle to work under Carl Stumpf, and his 1887 habilitation on the concept of number grew into Philosophie der Arithmetik in 1891. Gottlob Frege attacked that book for grounding mathematics in psychology, and Husserl's next major work, the Logical Investigations of 1900 and 1901, set out a careful refutation of exactly that psychologism.
Professorships followed at Göttingen from 1901 and Freiburg from 1916. In 1913 he published Ideen in the first issue of a yearbook he and his students had founded, marking a turn toward a transcendental phenomenology built on the phenomenological reduction and the claim that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of knowledge. Jean-Paul Sartre was among those who later objected.
The war struck his family hard: his son Wolfgang was killed at Verdun in March 1916, his other son Gerhart was wounded, and his gifted student Adolf Reinach died in Flanders in 1917. Husserl retired in 1928 but kept working. In 1933 Nazi racial laws barred him from the Freiburg university library because of his Jewish background, and he later resigned from the Deutsche Akademie. He died in Freiburg in 1938.
Source: Edmund Husserl
