Edmund Husserl 1859 – 1938
Edmund Husserl was a German philosopher of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the founder of phenomenology and one of the most influential figures of modern European thought. Trained in mathematics, he developed phenomenology as a rigorous descriptive science of the structures of consciousness and lived experience, beginning with the Logical Investigations of 1900-1901 and elaborated through Ideas and the Cartesian Meditations. His method of bracketing assumptions about the external world to analyse phenomena as they are given to consciousness reshaped continental philosophy. He held chairs at Gottingen and Freiburg, and his students and successors include Heidegger, Edith Stein, and a generation of French phenomenologists. As a Jew he was stripped of his university privileges by the Nazi regime in 1933 and barred from academic life until his death in 1938.
Key facts
- Nationality
- German
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Phenomenology, Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Edmund Husserl:
“Back to the things themselves.”
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Attributed to Edmund Husserl:
“Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people.”
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Attributed to Edmund Husserl:
“Consciousness is always consciousness of something.”
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Attributed to Edmund Husserl:
“Phenomenology is the science of essences.”
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Attributed to Edmund Husserl:
“Reason is the specific characteristic of man, as a being living in personal activities.”