Husserl, Edmund (1859—1938) German philosopher, founder of phenomenology and one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. His work was a significant influence on Heidegger, Martin, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Levinas, Emmanuel, Alfred Schütz, Rudolf Carnap, Ingarden, Roman, and Derrida, Jacques. Husserl was a prolific author, although he published relatively little in his own lifetime---he left work amounting to some 40,000 pages, which is steadily being published (at last count there were more than 27 volumes in the growing edition of his complete works). There is a major archive dedicated to his work in Leuven, Belgium. Born in Prostějov in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in the Czech Republic), into a Jewish family. He initially studied mathematics as an undergraduate at the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin, then completed a doctorate on calculus at the University of Vienna in 1883. Franz Brentano was lecturing on psychology and philosophy at the University of Vienna at that time and Husserl found himself drawn more and more in that direction. Brentano was forced to resign his position because of religious differences, so he advised Husserl to complete his habilitation with Carl Stumpf at the University of Halle. His habilitation, published in 1891 as Philosophie der Arithmetik (Philosophy of Arithmetic), was still on mathematics, but with a decided bent in the direction of psychology. Although he set out to provide a logical foundation for the existence of numbers, his project was severely criticized for psychologism by the logician Frege, Gottlob. Husserl subsequently amended his ideas and developed his own critique of psychologism in his next book, Logische Untersuchungen (1901), translated as Logical Investigations (1913), which attempted to show that concepts are not psychological. On the strength of this he was appointed to a position at the University of Göttingen in 1901 and he remained there until 1916, publishing two further volumes under the same title. In doing so he created phenomenology as a science. Phenomenology as Husserl conceived it is interested in discovering the specific processes of the mental synthesis and the concepts by which they are apprehended. Phenomenology differs from psychology in that it is not empiricism in its approach and deals with the essence of acts of consciousness. It isn’t empiricist because it questions the nature of the given, i.e. it does not assume that what appears does so without being shaped in some way by the determining influence of consciousness. There is a difference between sense data being registered by our mind and actually knowing what those sense data mean to us---even raw affect, such as the feeling of heat, needs to be processed so as to be read by the mind as meaning ‘danger’. How this processing takes place is more or less the sole concern of Husserl’s research for the remainder of his career. Phenomenology assumes that the world is as it appears to consciousness and that the mind is capable of intuiting the reality of the world. Phenomenology is not a form of relativism, but to avoid the consequences of its own starting position it has to show that the mind’s processes are capable of doing this independently of what is going on in the world. Husserl invented a method he called epochē (usually translated as ‘bracketing’), or phenomenological reduction, which enabled him to separate the act of consciousness---apperception---from the intentional objects of consciousness. In 1916, Husserl was appointed to a professorship in philosophy at the University of Freiburg. He taught there for the remainder of his career. It was there that he encountered his most famous students, such as Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, but also future Vienna Circle philosophers Rudolf Carnap and Moritz Schlick. In his final years, he was treated extremely poorly by the Nazi regime, which came to power in 1933. He was made to suffer considerable ignominy by his illustrious but politically misguided protégé Martin Heidegger, who (in his capacity as rector of Freiburg University) revoked his emeritus status and even deleted the dedication to him from his book (it was later restored). His books were added to the bonfires the Nazis held to cleanse their libraries of the writings of Jewish authors. His unpublished papers might have met the same fate were it not for the actions of Belgian priest Hermann van Breda. It is for this reason that the Husserl archive is today located in Leuven. Further Reading: A. Bowie Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas (2003). M. Russell Husserl: A Guide for the Perplexed (2006). D. Woodruff Smith Husserl (2006). D. Zahavi Husserl’s Phenomenology (2003).