Reinach, Adolf (1883–1917)

Adolf Reinach, a German philosopher of Jewish extraction, was born in Mainz and died on the battlefield in Flanders. He is of principal note as the inventor, in 1913, of a theory of speech acts (or ‘social acts’ to use Reinach’s own terminology) which in some respects surpasses the later work of thinkers such as J.L. Austin and Searle. Reinach was a leading member of the so-called Munich–Göttingen school of phenomenologists who were inspired by Husserl’s early realism and who rejected Husserl’s subsequent turn to ‘transcendental idealism’, drawing their inspiration rather from the more analytic orientation of thinkers such as Franz Brentano and other Austrian philosophers.