Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl (b. 1859–d. 1938) is a central figure in 20th-century philosophy. A student of Brentano (b. 1838–d. 1917) and a contemporary of Frege (b. 1848–d. 1925), he is the founding father of phenomenology and thereby a figure with a decisive impact not only on thinkers like Heidegger (b. 1889–d. 1976), Edith Stein (b. 1891–d. 1942), Merleau-Ponty (b. 1908–d. 1961), and Sartre (b. 1905–d. 1980), but also on subsequent theory formations in German and French philosophy. More recently, many of Husserl’s ideas have also been taken up and discussed by analytic philosophers. Husserl is primarily known for his analyses of intentionality, perception, temporality, embodiment, and intersubjectivity, for his rehabilitation of the lifeworld and his commitment to a form of transcendental idealism and for his criticism of reductionism, objectivism, and scientism. Most of Husserl’s writings have been published posthumously and they continue to disclose aspects of his thinking that it would have been difficult to anticipate through the study of the works originally published by Husserl himself. Many of these volumes have not yet been translated into English, and the same holds true for much of the research literature.