Husserl
Contemporary philosophyHusserl was a twentieth-century German philosopher (1859-1938). After studying mathematics, he devoted himself to philosophy, reflecting on the foundations and meaning of the discipline. He became a professor at the University of Halle and published his first major work, the Logical Investigations. He taught at the University of Göttingen, then at Freiburg im Breisgau, until he was stripped of his post by the antisemitic legislation of the Nazi regime. He is the founder of phenomenology, which stands in opposition to both psychologism and logicism.
Husserl's Works Summarised on This Site
Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy
Husserl shows in this work how one moves from the natural attitude to the phenomenologist's attitude, based on transcendental epochè
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
Husserl seeks an explanation for the crisis in the sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century, and beyond that, in European culture
Bibliography
Here are the essential books if you wish to gain a better understanding of this author's thought:
Moran, D. and Cohen, J., 2012, The Husserl Dictionary. London, Continuum Press
Ortiz Hill, Claire; da Silva, Jairo Jose, eds. (1997). The Road Not Taken: On Husserl's Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics. College Publications.
Sokolowski, Robert. Introduction to Phenomenology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Smith, B.; Smith, D. W., eds. (1995), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Zahavi, Dan, 2003. Husserl's Phenomenology. Stanford: Stanford University Press
Recommended Videos
Conferences, colloquia, radio broadcasts... here are 10 videos that will help you better understand Husserl's thought.
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Biography: Life of Husserl
Youth
Edmund Husserl was born in 1859 in Proßnitz, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Prostějov, in the Czech Republic).
After studying at Olmütz grammar school, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig in 1876 to take courses in astronomy, before turning to mathematics at the University of Berlin from 1878 to 1881.
Having completed his doctorate in mathematics, he began to reflect on the meaning and foundations of the discipline.
This led him to enrol at the University of Vienna to study philosophy.
In Berlin and Halle
One encounter proved decisive: that of Franz Brentano. The lectures of this professor — whose pupils also included Freud — made a lasting impression on him, to the point of convincing him to devote himself to philosophy for good.
In 1886, at the age of twenty-seven, he converted to Protestantism, having been born into a Jewish family.
That same year he was appointed to teach at the University of Halle as Privatdozent — a private lecturer paid by his students rather than by the state — a post he held for fourteen years.
In 1887 he defended a further thesis, this time in philosophy: "On the Concept of Number".
His first book, Philosophy of Arithmetic, appeared in 1891.
Husserl's intellectual career can be mapped across three phases:
- A psychologising approach to mathematics, as reflected in Philosophy of Arithmetic.
- A purely logicist approach, defended in Volume 1 of his next work, the Logical Investigations.
- Phenomenology, the phase in which Husserl's thought found its own consistency, grounded in a critique of both logicism and psychologism.
It was in Volume 2 of the Logical Investigations, published a few years later, that Husserl first set out this new approach.
At Göttingen
He was appointed professor at the University of Göttingen in 1906, where he taught for ten years.
At this stage Husserl was still little known; but an article published in the journal Logos in 1911, "Philosophy as Strict Science", established him as the founder of a new current of thought: phenomenology. Students flocked to him, and he founded a journal, the Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
It was in this journal that Husserl published Book I of his fundamental work, Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, in 1913.
At Freiburg
In 1916, he was appointed professor at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, a position he held for twelve years.
One of his students, Heidegger, served as his assistant from 1916 to 1922 before succeeding him at Freiburg. Heidegger would go on to take phenomenology in a direction quite unlike anything Husserl had envisaged.
In 1929, he published Formal and Transcendental Logic.
At the invitation of the Société française de philosophie, he delivered two lectures at the Sorbonne, which would later form the basis of Cartesian Meditations.
Faced with the many lines of inquiry he wished to pursue, he took to dictating his thoughts in shorthand so that nothing would impede the flow of his thinking. This produced an enormous body of unpublished material — over 300,000 pages — far exceeding the handful of works published during his lifetime.
Later Years
From 1933 onwards, Husserl was affected by the antisemitic measures enacted by the Nazis: he was denied access to the university library and dismissed from his post in 1936. He nonetheless refused to go into exile in the United States.
He gave lectures in Vienna and Prague, and published the first part of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.
He died in 1938 in Freiburg. His many unpublished manuscripts were transferred to Louvain to protect them from the Nazi threat, and are still held there at the Husserl Archives.
Main Works
Philosophy of Arithmetic
Logical Investigations
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness
Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy
Cartesian Meditations