Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl was born in 1859 at Prossnitz in Moravia (now in the Czech Republic) into a Jewish merchant family. He studied mathematics, physics and astronomy at Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna and took a doctorate in mathematics with a thesis on the calculus of variations; then, hearing the philosopher Brentano lecture in Vienna, he resolved to devote himself to philosophy. He was an unsalaried lecturer at Halle for fourteen years, and at forty-one published the Logical Investigations, which launched the phenomenological movement; he later taught at Göttingen and Freiburg, under the watchword 'back to the things themselves'. Heidegger was his assistant and student and succeeded to his chair at Freiburg. After the Nazis came to power he was barred from the university because of his Jewish origins and worked on in isolation. He left more than forty thousand pages of shorthand manuscripts, which a Belgian priest smuggled out of Germany at great risk and which survive to this day.