Home > Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl ( April 8, 1859 - April 26, 1938), philosopher, was born into a Jewish family in Prossnitz , Moravia (Prostejov, Czech Republic), Empire of Austria-Hungary. He is known as the "father" of phenomenology. He was a pupil of Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. Among others, he would influence Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. ( Hermann Weyl's interest in intuitionistic logic and impredicativity , for example, seems to have been as a result of contact with Husserl.) In 1887 he converted to Christianity and joined the Lutheran Church. He taught philosophy at Halle as a tutor (Privatdozent) from 1887, then at Göttingen as professor from 1901, and at Freiburg im Breisgau from 1916 until he retired in 1928. Following "retirement," he used the library at Freiburg to continue his researches and writing. He died at Freiburg on April 26, 1938. 1 Life and works
1.1 Husserl's studies and early works
Husserl initially studied mathematicsMathematics is commonly defined as the study of patterns of structure, change, and space; more informally, one might say it is the study of "figures and numbers". In the formalist view, it is the investigation of axiomatically defined abstract structures at the universities of LeipzigLeipzig [ˈlaiptsɪç] ( Sorbian/Lusatian: Lipsk is the largest city in the federal state ( Bundesland) of Saxony in Germany. The name is derived from the Slavic word (see Sorbian) Lipsk (settlement where the linden trees stand). It is s ( 1876Events January events January 31 The United States orders all Native Americans to move into reservations. February events February 2 The National League of Professional Baseball Clubs of Major League Baseball is formed. February 14 Alexander Graham Bell a) and BerlinBerlin [ bɛrˈliːn ] is the national capital of Germany and its largest city, with 3,387,404 inhabitants (as of September 2004); down from 4. 5 million before World War II. Berlin is located on the rivers Spree and Havel in the northea ( 1878Events January Cleopatra's Needle arrives in London January 9 Humbert I becomes King of Italy January 23 Disraeli orders British fleet to Dardanelles January 28 The Yale News becomes the first daily, college newspaper in the United States. January 31 Turk) with the then famous professors Karl Weierstrass and Leopold KroneckerLeopold Kronecker ( December 7, 1823 December 29, 1891) was a German mathematician and logician who argued that arithmetic and analysis must be founded on "whole numbers", saying, God made the natural numbers; all else is the work of man (Bell 1986, p.. In 1881Events January 16- 24 ? Siege of Geok Tepe ? Russian troops under general Skobeleff defeat Turkomans January 25 Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell form the Oriental Telephone Company February 5 Phoenix, Arizona is incorporated. February 13 First issu he went to Vienna to study under the supervision of Leo Königsberger (a former student of Weierstrass) and obtained his doctors degree in 1883 with the work Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations).
Only in 1884 in Vienna he started following lectures by Franz Brentano on psychology and philosophy. Brentano impressed him so much that he decided to dedicate his life to philosophy. Husserl studied briefly with him and then in 1886 went to the university of Halle to obtain his habilitation with Carl Stumpf, a former student of Brentano. Under his supervision he wrote Über den Begriff der Zahl (On the concept of Number; 1887) which would serve later as the base for his first major work the Philosophie der Arithmetik (Philosophy of Arithmetic; 1891).
In these first works he tries to combine mathematics, psychology and philosophy with as main goal to provide a sound foundation for mathematics. He analyses the psychological process needed to obtain the concept of number and then tries to build up a systematical theory on this analysis. To achieve this he uses several methods and concepts taken from his teachers. From Weierstrass he derives the idea that we generate the concept of number by counting a certain collection of objects. From Brentano and Stumpf he takes over the distinction between proper and improper presenting. In an example Husserl explains this in the following way: if you are standing in front of a house, you have a proper, direct presentation of that house, but if you are looking for it and ask for directions, then these directions (e.g. the house on the corner of this and that street) are an indirect, improper presentation. In other words, you can have a proper presentation of an object if it is actually present, and an improper (or symbolic as he also calls it) if you only can indicate that object through signs, symbols, etc.
Another important element that Husserl took over from Brentano, is intentionality, the notion that the main characteristic of consciousness is that it is always intentional. While often simplistically summarised as "aboutness" or the relationship between mental acts and the external world, Brentano defined it as the main characteristic of psychical phenomena, by which they could be distinguished from physical phenomena. Every mental phenomenon, every psychological act has a content, is directed at an object (the intentional object). Every belief, desire etc. has an object that they are about: the believed, the wanted. Brentano used the expression "intentional inexistence" to indicate the status of the objects of thought in the mind. The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, was the key feature to distinguish psychical phenomena and physical phenomena, because physical phenomena lack intentionality altogether.
