Edmund Husserl
German philosopher of Moravian Jewish origin (1859–1938), initially trained in mathematics in Vienna, where he attended Franz Brentano's classes, an experience that led him towards philosophy and bequeathed him the central concept of intentionality: the idea that all consciousness is always consciousness 'of' something. Successively professor at Halle, Göttingen and Freiburg, Husserl is regarded as the founder of phenomenology, a rigorous philosophical method designed to describe the essential structures of conscious experience as they directly manifest themselves to consciousness, without prior metaphysical assumptions about the independent existence of the external world. His foundational work, Logical Investigations (1900–1901), combined a devastating critique of psychologism —the reduction of logical laws to mere contingent psychological regularities— with a meticulous analysis of acts of consciousness, laying the foundations of the phenomenological method. In Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (1913), Husserl introduced the central technique of his mature philosophy: the epoché, or 'bracketing' of the natural belief in the existence of the world (the 'phenomenological reduction'), a methodical procedure aimed at suspending all judgement about the real existence of objects in order to examine purely how they are given to consciousness, revealing the universal and essential structures of experience. In his final major work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (unfinished, published posthumously), Husserl diagnosed a profound crisis of Western rationality stemming from the forgetting of the 'life-world' (Lebenswelt), the pre-scientific realm of immediate everyday experience that constitutes the original ground upon which all scientific abstractions are built. Expelled from his chair in 1933 under Nazi racial laws because of his Jewish origins, Husserl died academically isolated, though his pupil Martin Heidegger and others such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty disseminated and transformed his phenomenological method, which remains one of the most influential currents of twentieth-century continental philosophy.