Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was born at Prossnitz in Moravia of Jewish parents. He began his studies in mathematics at Leipzig, Berlin and finally Vienna where, in 1884, he attended the lectures of Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano, about whom he remarked "Without Brentano I should have written not a word of philosophy." Profoundly impressed, Husserl decided to leave mathematics for philosophy. He later taught at Halle, Gottingen and Freiburg in Breisgau...

Husserl's phenomenology, his descriptive method, and his theory of intentionality became the source of the phenomenological movement in philosophy, while his further development of Brentano's theory of intentionality - the view that all consciousness is essentially referential, that is, consciousness of something - is incorporated both by "phenomenologists" and "analytic" philosophers. In Germany, Husserl's philosophy continued most notably in the work of Martin Heidegger; in France its two leading proponents were Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Husserl's most famous pupil, Jean-Paul Sartre who used pheonomenology to create another widely influential movement, existentialism.


bio by Daniel Kolak in Lovers of Wisdom
(Wadsworth, 1997)