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Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (; 8 April 1859 – 27 April 1938Smith, D. W. (2007). Husserl. p. xiv.) was an Austrian-German philosopher and mathematician who established the school of phenomenology.
In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality. In his mature work, he sought to develop a systematic foundational science based on the so-called phenomenological reduction. Arguing that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of all possible knowledge, Husserl redefined phenomenology as a transcendental-idealist philosophy. Husserl's thought profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, and he remains a notable figure in contemporary philosophy and beyond.
Husserl studied mathematics, taught by Karl Weierstrass and Leo Königsberger, and philosophy taught by Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. He taught philosophy as a Privatdozent at Halle from 1887, then as professor, first at Göttingen from 1901, then at Freiburg from 1916 until he retired in 1928, after which he remained highly productive. In 1933, under racial laws of the Nazi Party, Husserl was banned from using the library of the University of Freiburg due to his Jewish family background and months later resigned from the Deutsche Akademie. Following an illness, he died in Freiburg in 1938.
At the University of Leipzig from 1876 to 1878, Husserl studied mathematics, physics, and astronomy. At Leipzig, he was inspired by philosophy lectures given by Wilhelm Wundt, one of the founders of modern psychology. Then he moved to the Frederick William University of Berlin (the present-day Humboldt University of Berlin) in 1878, where he continued his study of mathematics under Leopold Kronecker and Karl Weierstrass. In Berlin, he found a mentor in Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (then a former philosophy student of Franz Brentano and later the first president of Czechoslovakia) and attended Friedrich Paulsen's philosophy lectures. In 1881, he left for the University of Vienna to complete his mathematics studies under the supervision of Leo Königsberger (a former student of Weierstrass). At Vienna in 1883, he obtained his PhD with the work Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung ( Contributions to the Calculus of variations).
Evidently, as a result of his becoming familiar with the New Testament during his twenties, Husserl asked to be baptized into the Lutheran Church in 1886. Husserl's father, Adolf, had died in 1884. Herbert Spiegelberg writes, "While outward religious practice never entered his life any more than it did that of most academic scholars of the time, his mind remained open for the religious phenomenon as for any other genuine experience." At times Husserl saw his goal as one of moral "renewal". Although a steadfast proponent of a radical and rational autonomy in all things, Husserl could also speak "about his vocation and even about his mission under God's will to find new ways for philosophy and science," observes Spiegelberg.Spiegelberg, H. The Phenomenological Movement. A historical introduction. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2d ed. . Vol. I, pp. 85–87. It was reported "from witnesses of Husserl's last days – that Husserl had something like a deathbed conversion." Spiegelberg (1971) at I:85.
Following his PhD in mathematics, Husserl returned to Berlin to work as the assistant to Karl Weierstrass. Yet already Husserl had felt the desire to pursue philosophy. Then Weierstrass became very ill. Husserl became free to return to Vienna, where, after serving a short military duty, he devoted his attention to philosophy. In 1884, at the University of Vienna he attended the lectures of Franz Brentano on philosophy and philosophical psychology. Brentano introduced him to the writings of Bernard Bolzano, Hermann Lotze, J. Stuart Mill, and David Hume. Husserl was so impressed by Brentano that he decided to dedicate his life to philosophy; indeed, Franz Brentano is often credited as being his most important influence, e.g., with regard to intentionality. Following academic advice, two years later in 1886 Husserl followed Carl Stumpf, a former student of Brentano, to the University of Halle, seeking to obtain his habilitation which would qualify him to teach at the university level. There, under Stumpf's supervision, he wrote his habilitation thesis, Über den Begriff der Zahl ( On the Concept of Number), in 1887, which would serve later as the basis for his first important work, Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891).Kockelmans, "Biographical Note" per Edmund Husserl, 17–20, at 17–18, in his edited Phenomenology (Doubleday Anchor 1967). Husserl's 'Philosophie der Arithmetik is further discussed here below.
In 1887, Husserl married Malvine Steinschneider, a union that would last over fifty years. In 1892, their daughter Elizabeth was born, in 1893 their son Gerhart Husserl, and in 1894 their son Wolfgang. Elizabeth would marry in 1922, and Gerhart in 1923; Wolfgang, however, became a casualty of the First World War. Gerhart would become a philosopher of law, contributing to the subject of comparative law, teaching in the United States and after the war in Austria.
In 1901, Husserl with his family moved to the University of Göttingen, where he taught as extraordinarius professor. Just prior to this, a major work of his, Logische Untersuchungen (Halle, 1900–1901), was published. Volume One contains seasoned reflections on "pure logic" in which he carefully refutes "psychologism".Husserl's Logische, in its disentangling of psychology from logic, also served as preparation for the later development of his work in phenomenological reduction. Marvin Farber, "Husserl and Philosophical Radicalism. The ideas of a presuppositionless philosophy" 37–57 at 47–48, in Kockelmans, ed., Phenomenology (1967). This work was well received and became the subject of a seminar given by Wilhelm Dilthey; Husserl in 1905 traveled to Berlin to visit Dilthey. Two years later, in Italy, he paid a visit to Franz Brentano, his inspiring old teacher, and to the mathematician Constantin Carathéodory. Immanuel Kant and Descartes were also now influencing his thought. In 1910, he became joint editor of the journal Logos. During this period, Husserl had delivered lectures on internal time consciousness, which several decades later his former students Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger edited for publication.Husserl, Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1928), translated as The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (Indiana University 1964).
In 1912, in Freiburg, the journal Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung ("Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research") was founded by Husserl and his school, which published articles of their phenomenological movement from 1913 to 1930. His important work IdeenHusserl, Ideen au einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (1913), translated as Ideas. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (New York: Macmillan, 1931; reprint Collier), with "Author's Preface to the English Edition" at 5–22. Therein, Husserl in 1931 refers to "Transcendental Subjectivity" being "a new field of experience" opened as a result of practicing phenomenological reduction, and giving rise to an a priori science not empirically based but somewhat similar to mathematics. By such practice, the individual becomes the "transcendental Ego", although Husserl acknowledges the problem of solipsism. Later he emphasizes "the necessary stressing of the difference between transcendental and psychological subjectivity, the repeated declaration that transcendental phenomenology is not in any sense psychology" but rather (in contrast to naturalistic psychology) by the phenomenological reduction "the life of the soul is made intelligible in its most intimate and originally intuitional essence" and whereby "objects of the most varied grades right up to the level of the objective world are there for the Ego" ( Ibid. at 5–7, 11–12, 18). was published in its first issue (Vol. 1, Issue 1, 1913). Before beginning Ideen, Husserl's thought had reached the stage where "each subject is 'presented' to itself, and to each all others are 'presentiated' ( Vergegenwärtigung), not as parts of nature but as pure consciousness".Ricoeur, Paul (1967). Husserl. An Analysis of His Phenomenology. p. 33. In his " Ideen period" (1911–1925) Husserl also produced two unpublished manuscripts later referred to as Ideen II and Ideen III. Ricœur (1967) at 35. Ideen advanced his transition to a "transcendental interpretation" of phenomenology, a view later criticized by, among others, Jean-Paul Sartre.Jean-Paul Sartre, "La Transcendance de L'Ego. Esquisse d'une description phénoménologique" in Recherches Philosophiques, VI (1937), translated as The Transcendence of the Ego. An existentialist theory of consciousness (New York: The Noonday Press 1957). Sartre's "disagreement with Husserl seems to have facilitated the transition from phenomenology to the existentialist doctrines of L'Être et le Néant 1943." F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick, "Translator's introduction" 11–27, at 12, to Transcendence of the Ego (1957). In Ideen Paul Ricœur sees the development of Husserl's thought as leading "from the psychological cogito to the transcendental cogito". As phenomenology further evolves, it leads (when viewed from another vantage point in Husserl's 'labyrinth') to "transcendental subjectivity".Ricoeur, Paul (1967). Husserl. An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Northwestern University. pp. 29, 30; cf., 177–178. Also in Ideen Husserl explicitly elaborates the phenomenological and eidetic reductions.Husserl, Ideen (1913), translated as Ideas (1931), e.g., at 161–165.Ricoeur, Husserl (1967) at 25–27. Ideen does not address the problem of solipsism. Ricœur (1967) at 31. Ivan Ilyin and Karl Jaspers visited Husserl at Göttingen.
In October 1914, both his sons were sent to fight on the Western Front of World War I, and the following year, one of them, Wolfgang Husserl, was badly injured. On 8 March 1916, on the battlefield of Verdun, Wolfgang was killed in action. The next year, his other son, Gerhart Husserl was wounded in the war but survived. His own mother, Julia, died. In November 1917, one of his outstanding students and later a noted philosophy professor in his own right, Adolf Reinach, was killed in the war while serving in Flanders.
Husserl had transferred in 1916 to the University of Freiburg (in Freiburg im Breisgau) where he continued bringing his work in philosophy to fruition, now as a full professor.Peter Koestenbaum, "Introductory Essay" ix–lxxvii, at lxxv, in Husserl, The Paris Lectures (The Hague: Nijhoff, 2d ed. 1967). Edith Stein served as his personal assistant during his first few years in Freiburg, followed later by Martin Heidegger from 1920 to 1923. The mathematician Hermann Weyl began corresponding with him in 1918. Husserl gave four lectures on the phenomenological method at University College London in 1922. The University of Berlin in 1923 called on him to relocate there, but he declined the offer. In 1926, Heidegger dedicated his book Sein und Zeit ( Being and Time) to him "in grateful respect and friendship."In the 1962 translation Being and Time by John Macquarrie and Robinson, Heidegger states: "Dedicated to Edmund Husserl in friendship and admiration. Todnauberg in Baden, Black Forest, 8 April 1926". Husserl remained in his professorship at Freiburg until he requested retirement, teaching his last class on 25 July 1928. A Festschrift to celebrate his seventieth birthday was presented to him on 8 April 1929.
Despite retirement, Husserl gave several notable lectures. The first, at Paris in 1929,Edmund Husserl, Pariser Vorträge 1929, translated as The Paris Lectures (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2d ed. 1967), by Peter Koestenbaum, with an "Introductory Essay" at ix–lxxvii. led to Méditations cartésiennes (Paris 1931).This work was published first in French. Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes (Paris: Armand Colin 1931), translated by Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Levinas. A German edition Cartesianische Meditationen (which Husserl had reworked) came out in 1950. Husserl here reviews the phenomenological epoché (or phenomenological reduction), presented earlier in his pivotal Ideen (1913), in terms of a further reduction of experience to what he calls a 'sphere of ownness.' From within this sphere, which Husserl enacts to show the impossibility of solipsism, the transcendental Human ego finds itself always already paired with the lived body of another ego, another monad. This 'a priori' interconnection of bodies, given in perception, is what founds the interconnection of consciousnesses known as transcendental intersubjectivity, which Husserl would go on to describe at length in volumes of unpublished writings. There has been a debate over whether or not Husserl's description of ownness and its movement into intersubjectivity is sufficient to reject the charge of solipsism, to which Descartes, for example, was subject. One argument against Husserl's description works this way: instead of infinity and the Deity being the ego's gateway to the Other, as in Descartes, Husserl's ego in the Cartesian Meditations itself becomes transcendent. It remains, however, alone (unconnected). Only the ego's grasp "by analogy" of the Other (e.g., by conjectural reciprocity) allows the possibility for an 'objective' intersubjectivity, and hence for community.Ricoeur, Paul (1967). Husserl. An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Northwestern University. pp. 82–85, 115–116, 123–142. Ricoeur wonders whether here Husserl does not "square the circle" regarding the issue of solipsism.
In 1933, the racial laws of the new National Socialist German Workers Party were enacted. On 6 April Husserl was banned from using the library at the University of Freiburg, or any other academic library; the following week, after a public outcry, he was reinstated. Yet his colleague Heidegger was elected Rector of the university on 21–22 April, and joined the Nazi Party. By contrast, in July Husserl resigned from the Deutsche Akademie.
Later, Husserl lectured at Prague in 1935 and Vienna in 1936, which resulted in a very differently styled work that, while innovative, is no less problematic: Die Krisis (Belgrade 1936).Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (Belgrade 1936). "As a Jew who was denied any public platform in Germany, Husserl had to publish, as he had lectured, outside his own country." Philosophia in Belgrade began its publication. David Carr, "Translator's Introduction" xv–xliii, at xvii, to Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Northwestern University 1970).Quentin Lauer, "Introduction", pp. 1–68, at pp. 6–7, in Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row/Torchbook 1965); translated are two works by Husserl: the 1935 Prague lecture "Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man" Philosophie, and the 1911 essay "Philosophy as Rigorous Science" Philosophie. Husserl describes here the cultural crisis gripping Europe, then approaches a philosophy of history, discussing Galileo, Descartes, several British philosophers, and Immanuel Kant. The apolitical Husserl before had specifically avoided such historical discussions, pointedly preferring to go directly to an investigation of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty and others question whether Husserl here does not undercut his own position, in that Husserl had attacked in principle historicism, while specifically designing his phenomenology to be rigorous enough to transcend the limits of history. On the contrary, Husserl may be indicating here that historical traditions are merely features given to the pure ego's intuition, like any other.Carr, David (1970) "Translator's Introduction" xv–xliii, at xxx–xxxi, xxxiv–xxxv, xxxvii–xxxviii (historicism), xxxvi–xxxvii (as given), to Husserl, The Crises of European Sciences.Ricœur, Paul (1949) "Husserl et le sens de l'histoire", as translated in his Husserl. An Analysis of His Phenomenology (1967) at pp. 143–174. A longer section follows on the "lifeworld" Lebenswelt, one not observed by the objective logic of science, but a world seen through subjective experience.Husserl, The Crises of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Northwestern University 1970), e.g., at 127. Yet a problem arises similar to that dealing with 'history' above, a chicken-and-egg problem. Does the lifeworld contextualize and thus compromise the gaze of the pure ego, or does the phenomenological method nonetheless raise the ego up transcendent?Carr, David (1970) "Translator's Introduction" xv–xliii, at xxxviii–xlii, to Husserl, The Crises of European Sciences. These last writings presented the fruits of his professional life. Since his university retirement, Husserl had "worked at a tremendous pace, producing several major works."
After suffering a fall in the autumn of 1937, the philosopher became ill with pleurisy. Edmund Husserl died in Freiburg on 27 April 1938, having just turned 79. His wife, Malvine, survived him. Eugen Fink, his research assistant, delivered his eulogy. Gerhard Ritter was the only Freiburg faculty member to attend the funeral, as an anti-Nazi protest.
In the wartime 1941 edition of Heidegger's primary work, Being and Time ( Sein und Zeit, first published in 1927), the original dedication to Husserl was removed. This was not due to a negation of the relationship between the two philosophers, however, but rather was the result of a suggested censorship by Heidegger's publisher who feared that the book might otherwise be banned by the Nazi regime."Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten". Der Spiegel, 31 May 1967. The dedication can still be found in a footnote on page 38, thanking Husserl for his guidance and generosity. Husserl had died three years earlier. In post-war editions of Sein und Zeit the dedication to Husserl is restored. The complex, troubled, and sundered philosophical relationship between Husserl and Heidegger has been widely discussed.
On 4 May 1933, Professor Edmund Husserl addressed the recent regime change in Germany and its consequences:
The future alone will judge which was the true Germany in 1933, and who were the true Germans—those who subscribe to the more or less materialistic-mythical racial prejudices of the day, or those Germans pure in heart and mind, heirs to the great Germans of the past whose tradition they revere and perpetuate.Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (Penguin 2003), p. 421.After his death, Husserl's manuscripts, amounting to approximately 40,000 pages of " Gabelsberger" stenography and his complete research library, were in 1939 smuggled to the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium by the Franciscan priest Herman Van Breda. There they were deposited at Leuven to form the Husserl-Archives of the Higher Institute of Philosophy.Cf., Peter Koestenbaum, "Introductory Essay" ix–lxxvii, at lxxv–lxxvi, in his edited Edmund Husserl, The Paris Lectures (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2d ed. 1967). His widow, Malvine, was instrumental in this rescue project; she became a convert to Catholicism in 1941. Much of the material in his research manuscripts has since been published in the Husserliana critical edition series.Kockelmans, "The Husserl-Archives", at 20–21, in his edited Phenomenology (Doubleday Anchor 1967).
Another important element that Husserl took over from Brentano was intentionality, the notion that the main characteristic of consciousness is that it is always intentional. While often simplistically summarised as "aboutness" or the relationship between mental acts and the external world, Brentano defined it as the main characteristic of mental phenomena, by which they could be distinguished from physical phenomena. Every mental phenomenon, every psychological act, has a content, is directed at an object (the intentional object). Every belief, desire, etc. has an object that it is about: the believed, the wanted. Brentano used the expression "intentional inexistence" to indicate the status of the objects of thought in the mind. The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, was the key feature to distinguish mental phenomena and physical phenomena, because physical phenomena lack intentionality altogether.Chisholm, R. M. (1967). "Intentionality". The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 4: 201.
From the Ideen onward, Husserl concentrated on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. The metaphysical problem of establishing the reality of what people perceive, as distinct from the perceiving subject, was of little interest to Husserl in spite of his being a transcendental idealist. Husserl proposed that the world of objects—and of ways in which people direct themselves toward and perceive those objects—is normally conceived of in what he called the "natural attitude", which is characterized by a belief that objects exist distinct from the perceiving subject and exhibit properties that people see as emanating from them (this attitude is also called Physicalism objectivism). Husserl proposed a radical new phenomenological way of looking at objects by examining how people, in their many ways of being intentionally directed toward them, actually "constitute" them (to be distinguished from materially creating objects or objects merely being figments of the imagination); in the Phenomenological standpoint, the object ceases to be something simply "external" and ceases to be seen as providing indicators about what it is, and becomes a grouping of perceptual and functional aspects that imply one another under the idea of a particular object or "type". The notion of objects as real is not expelled by phenomenology, but "bracketed" as a way in which people regard objectsinstead of a feature that inheres in an object's essence, founded in the relation between the object and the perceiver. To better understand the world of appearances and objects, phenomenology attempts to identify the invariant features of how objects are perceived and pushes attributions of reality into their role as an attribution about the things people perceive (or an assumption underlying how people perceive objects). The major dividing line in Husserl's thought is the turn to transcendental idealism.
In a later period, Husserl began to wrestle with the complicated issues of intersubjectivity, specifically, how communication about an object can be assumed to refer to the same ideal entity ( Cartesian Meditations, Meditation V). Husserl tries new methods of bringing his readers to understand the importance of phenomenology to scientific inquiry (and specifically to psychology) and what it means to "bracket" the natural attitude. The Crisis of the European Sciences is Husserl's unfinished work that deals most directly with these issues. In it, Husserl for the first time attempts a historical overview of the development of Western philosophy and science, emphasizing the challenges presented by their increasingly one-sided empirical and naturalistic orientation. Husserl declares that mental and spiritual reality possess their own reality independent of any physical basis,This assumption led Husserl to an idealistic position (which he originally had tried to overcome or avoid). On Husserl's phenomenological idealism see Hans Köchler, Die Subjekt-Objekt-Dialektik in der transzendentalen Phänomenologie. Das Seinsproblem zwischen Idealismus und Realismus. ( Monographien zur philosophischen Forschung, Vol. 112.) Meisenheim a. G.: Anton Hain, 1974. and that a science of the mind ('Geisteswissenschaft') must be established on as scientific a foundation as the have managed: "It is my conviction that intentional phenomenology has for the first time made spirit as spirit the field of systematic scientific experience, thus effecting a total transformation of the task of knowledge." Crisis of European Humanity, Pt. II, 1935
Husserl also identifies a series of "formal words" which are necessary to form sentences and have no sensible . Examples of formal words are "a", "the", "more than", "over", "under", "two", "group", and so on. Every sentence must contain formal words to designate what Husserl calls "formal categories". There are two kinds of categories: meaning categories and formal-ontological categories. Meaning categories relate judgments; they include forms of conjunction, disjunction, Plural, among others. Formal-ontological categories relate objects and include notions such as set, cardinal number, ordinal number, part and whole, relation, and so on. The way people know these categories is through a faculty of understanding called "categorial intuition".
Through sensible intuition, consciousness constitutes what Husserl calls a "situation of affairs" (Sachlage). It is a passive constitution where objects themselves are presented. To this situation of affairs, through categorial intuition, people are able to constitute a "state of affairs" (Sachverhalt). One situation of affairs, through objective acts of consciousness (acts of constituting categorially) can serve as the basis for constituting multiple states of affairs. For example, suppose a and b are two sensible objects in a certain situation of affairs. It can be used as the basis to say, " a< b" and " b> a", two judgments which designate the same state of affairs. For Husserl, a sentence has a proposition or judgment as its meaning, and refers to a state of affairs which has a situation of affairs as a reference base.
Thanks to "eidetic reduction" (or "essential intuition"), people are able to grasp the possibility, impossibility, necessity, and contingency among concepts and among formal categories. Categorial intuition, along with categorial abstraction and eidetic reduction, are the basis for logical and mathematical knowledge.
Husserl criticized the logicians of his day for not focusing on the relation between subjective processes that offer objective knowledge of pure logic. All subjective activities of consciousness need an ideal correlate, and objective logic (constituted ), as it is constituted by consciousness, needs a noetic correlate (the subjective activities of consciousness).
Husserl stated that logic has three strata, each further away from consciousness and psychology than those that precede it.
The ontological correlate to the third stratum is the "manifolds". In formal ontology, it is a free investigation where a mathematician can assign several meanings to several symbols, and all their possible valid deductions in a general and indeterminate manner. It is, properly speaking, the most universal mathematics of all. Through the positing of certain indeterminate objects (formal-ontological categories) as well as any combination of mathematical axioms, mathematicians can explore the Apodicticity connections between them, as long as consistency is preserved.
According to Husserl, this view of logic and mathematics accounted for the objectivity of a series of mathematical developments of his time, such as n-dimensional (both Euclidean and non-Euclidean), Hermann Grassmann's exterior algebra, William Rowan Hamilton's Hamiltonians, Sophus Lie's theory of transformation groups, and Georg Cantor set theory.
Jacob Klein was one student of Husserl who pursued this line of inquiry, seeking to "desedimentize" mathematics and the mathematical sciences.
Husserl's review of Ernst Schröder, published before Frege's landmark 1892 article, clearly distinguishes sense from reference; thus, Husserl's notions of noema and object also arose independently. Likewise, in his criticism of Frege in the Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl remarks on the distinction between the content and the extension of a concept. Moreover, the distinction between the subjective mental act, namely the content of a concept, and the (external) object, was developed independently by Brentano and his school, and may have surfaced as early as Brentano's 1870s lectures on logic.
Scholars such as J. N. Mohanty, Claire Ortiz Hill, and Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock, among others, have argued that Husserl's so-called change from psychologism to Platonism came about independently of Frege's review.Consider Jitendra Nath Mohanty, 1995, "The Development of Husserl's Thought" in Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, Cambridge University Press. For further commentaries on the review, see Willard, Dallas, 1984. Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge. Athens OH: Ohio University Press, p. 63; J. Philip Miller, 1982. "Numbers in Presence and Absence, Phaenomenologica 90 (Den Haag: Nijhoff): p. 19 ff.; and Jitendra Nath Mohanty, 1984, "Husserl, Frege and the Overcoming of Psychologism", in Cho, Kay Kyung, ed., Philosophy and Science in Phenomenological Perspective, Phaenomenologica 95 (Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Nijhoff), p. 145. For example, the review falsely accuses Husserl of subjectivizing everything, so that no objectivity is possible, and falsely attributes to him a notion of abstraction whereby objects disappear until all that remains are numbers as mere ghosts. Contrary to what Frege states, in Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic, there are already two different kinds of representations: subjective and objective. Moreover, objectivity is clearly defined in that work. Frege's attack seems to be directed at certain foundational doctrines then current in Weierstrass's Berlin School, of which Husserl and Cantor cannot be said to be orthodox representatives.
Furthermore, various sources indicate that Husserl changed his mind about psychologism as early as 1890, a year before he published the Philosophy of Arithmetic. Husserl stated that by the time he published that book, he had already changed his mind—that he had doubts about psychologism from the very outset. He attributed this change of mind to his reading of Leibniz, Bolzano, Lotze, and David Hume. Husserl-Chronik, pp. 25–26 Husserl makes no mention of Frege as a decisive factor in this change. In his Logical Investigations, Husserl mentions Frege only twice, once in a footnote to point out that he had retracted three pages of his criticism of Frege's The Foundations of Arithmetic, and again to question Frege's use of the word Bedeutung to designate "reference" rather than "meaning" (sense).
In a letter dated 24 May 1891, Frege thanked Husserl for sending him a copy of the Philosophy of Arithmetic and Husserl's review of Ernst Schröder's Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik. In the same letter, Frege used the review of Schröder's book to analyze Husserl's notion of the sense of reference of concept words. Hence Frege recognized, as early as 1891, that Husserl distinguished between sense and reference. Consequently, Frege and Husserl independently elaborated a theory of sense and reference before 1891.
Commentators argue that Husserl's notion of noema has nothing to do with Frege's notion of sense, because noemata are necessarily fused with noeses, which are the conscious activities of consciousness. Noemata have three different levels:
In detail, Husserl's conception of logic and mathematics differs from that of Frege, who held that arithmetic could be derived from logic. For Husserl, this is not the case: mathematics (with the exception of geometry) is the ontological correlate of logic, and while both fields are related, neither one is strictly reducible to the other.
Since "truth-in-itself" has "being-in-itself" as ontological correlate, and since psychologists reduce truth (and hence logic) to empirical psychology, the inevitable consequence is scepticism. Psychologists have not been successful either in showing how induction or psychological processes can justify the absolute certainty of logical principles, such as the principles of identity and non-contradiction. It is therefore futile to base certain logical laws and principles on uncertain processes of the mind.
This confusion made by psychologism (and related disciplines such as biologism and anthropologism) can be due to three specific prejudices:
From this criticism to psychologism, the distinction between psychological acts and their intentional objects, and the difference between the normative side of logic and the theoretical side, derives from a Platonist conception of logic. This means that logical and mathematical laws should be regarded as being independent of the human mind, and also as an autonomy of meanings. It is essentially the difference between the real (everything subject to time) and the ideal or irreal (everything that is atemporal), such as logical truths, mathematical entities, mathematical truths, and meanings in general.
Martin Heidegger is the best known of Husserl's students, the one whom Husserl chose as his successor at Freiburg. Heidegger's magnum opus Being and Time was dedicated to Husserl. They shared their thoughts and worked alongside each other for over a decade at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger being Husserl's assistant during 1920–1923.Kockelmans, "Introduction Martin" 267–276, 273, in Kockelmans, editor, Phenomenology (1967). Heidegger's early work followed his teacher, but with time he began to develop new insights distinctively variant. Husserl became increasingly critical of Heidegger's work, especially in 1929, and included pointed criticism of Heidegger in lectures he gave during 1931.See above subsection "Heidegger and the Nazi era". Heidegger, while acknowledging his debt to Husserl, followed a political position offensive and harmful to Husserl after the Nazis came to power in 1933, Husserl being of Jewish origin and Heidegger infamously being then a Nazi proponent.The multivalent, including the "horrifying", aspects of Heidegger in a parallel context are recounted in Peter Eli Gordon, Rosensweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (University of California 2003) at 13–14 (Heidegger and Rosensweig's early "kinship" with him). "In 1929, however, one could still read Heidegger's philosophy without being drawn into a controversy concerning its relationship to National Socialism, antisemitism, and the like. The German philosophical world as a whole still cloaked itself in a mantle of relative innocence." Gordon (2003) at 303–304. "Rosensweig's work represents the culmination of what is often called the German Jewish Tradition." Gordon, "Preface" (2003) at xix. Academic discussion of Husserl and Heidegger is extensive.
At Göttingen in 1913, Adolf Reinach "was now Husserl's right hand. He was above all the mediator between Husserl and the students, for he understood extremely well how to deal with other persons, whereas Husserl was pretty much helpless in this respect."Edith Stein, Reinach as a Philosophical Personality Selection xxvii–xxix, at xxvii, in Aletheia, III (1985). He was an original editor of Husserl's new journal, Jahrbuch; one of his works (giving a phenomenological analysis of the law of obligations) appeared in its first issue.Adolf Reinach, "Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes" in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, I: 685–847 (1913), translated as "The A Priori Foundation of Civil Law" in Aletheia, III: 1–142 (1983). Reinach was widely admired and a remarkable teacher. Husserl, in his 1917 obituary, wrote, "He wanted to draw only from the deepest sources, he wanted to produce only work of enduring value. And through his wise restraint, he succeeded in this."Edmund Husserl, Reinach as a Philosophical Personality Obituary xi–xiv, at xi, in Aletheia, III (1985).
Edith Stein was Husserl's student at Göttingen and Freiburg while she wrote her doctoral thesis The Empathy Problem as it Developed Historically and Considered Phenomenologically (1916). She then became his assistant at Freiburg in 1916–18. She later adapted her phenomenology to the modern school of modern Thomism.Waltraud Herbstrith, Edith Stein: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1985 1971), pp. 13–14, 24; 42–44.
Ludwig Landgrebe became assistant to Husserl in 1923. From 1939, he collaborated with Eugen Fink at the Husserl-Archives in Leuven. In 1954, he became the leader of the Husserl-Archives. Landgrebe is known as one of Husserl's closest associates, but also for his independent views relating to history, religion, and politics as seen from the viewpoints of existentialist philosophy and metaphysics.
Eugen Fink was a close associate of Husserl during the 1920s and 1930s. He wrote the Sixth Cartesian Meditation which Husserl said was the truest expression and continuation of his own work. Fink delivered the eulogy for Husserl in 1938.
Roman Ingarden, an early student of Husserl at Freiburg, corresponded with Husserl into the mid-1930s. Ingarden did not accept, however, the later transcendental idealism of Husserl which he thought would lead to relativism. Ingarden has written his work in German and Polish. In his Spór o istnienie świata (Ger.: "Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt", Eng.: "Dispute about existence of the world"), he created his own realistic position, which also helped to spread phenomenology in Poland.
Max Scheler met Husserl in Halle in 1901 and found in his phenomenology a methodological breakthrough for his own philosophy. Scheler, who was at Göttingen when Husserl taught there, was one of the original few editors of the journal Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung (1913). Scheler's work Formalism in Ethics and Nonformal Ethics of Value appeared in the new journal (1913 and 1916) and drew acclaim. The personal relationship between the two men, however, became strained, due to Scheler's legal troubles, and Scheler returned to Munich.John Raphael Staude, Max Scheler (New York: Free Press 1967) at 19–20, 27–28. Although Scheler later criticised Husserl's idealistic logical approach and proposed instead a "phenomenology of love", he states that he remained "deeply indebted" to Husserl throughout his work.
Nicolai Hartmann was once thought to be at the center of phenomenology, but perhaps no longer. In 1921, the prestige of Hartmann, the neo-Kantian, who was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Marburg, was added to the Movement; he "publicly declared his solidarity with the actual work of die Phänomenologie." Yet Hartmann's connections were with Max Scheler and the Munich circle; Husserl himself evidently did not consider him a phenomenologist. His philosophy, however, is said to include an innovative use of the method.Spiegelberg, Herbert (1971). The Phenomenological Movement. pp. 258–259; 371 (Scheler), 379–384 (use of method).
Emmanuel Levinas in 1929 gave a presentation at one of Husserl's last seminars in Freiburg. Also that year, he wrote on Husserl's Ideen (1913) a long review published by a French journal. With Gabrielle Peiffer, Levinas translated into French Husserl's Méditations cartésiennes (1931). He was at first impressed with Heidegger and began a book on him, but broke off the project when Heidegger became involved with the Nazis. After the war he wrote on Jewish spirituality; most of his family had been murdered by the Nazis in Lithuania. Levinas then began to write works that would become widely known and admired.Unsigned "Preface" at vii–x, to Emmanuel Levinas. Basic philosophical writings (Indiana University 1996), edited by Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi.
Alfred Schutz's Phenomenology of the Social World seeks to rigorously ground Max Weber's interpretive sociology in Husserl's phenomenology. Husserl was impressed by this work and asked Schutz to be his assistant.George Walsh, "Introduction", Alfred Schütz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Illinois 1997) p. xviii
Jean-Paul Sartre was also largely influenced by Husserl, although he later came to disagree with key points in his analyses. Sartre rejected Husserl's transcendental interpretations begun in his Ideen (1913) and instead followed Heidegger's ontology.Sartre, The Transcendent of the Ego. An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness 1937 (New York: Noonday 1957).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception is influenced by Edmund Husserl's work on perception, intersubjectivity, intentionality, space,See, for example, the influence of Husserl on Merleau-Ponty's conception of l'espace as expounded in: Nader El-Bizri, "A Phenomenological Account of the Ontological Problem of Space", Existentia Meletai-Sophias, 12 (2002), pp.345–364 and temporality, including Husserl's theory of retention and protention. Merleau-Ponty's description of 'motor intentionality' and sexuality, for example, retains the important structure of the noetic/noematic correlation of Ideen I, yet further concretizes what it means for Husserl when consciousness particularizes itself into modes of intuition. Merleau-Ponty's most clearly Husserlian work is, perhaps, "the Philosopher and His Shadow." Depending on the interpretation of Husserl's accounts of eidetic intuition, given in Husserl's Phenomenological PsychologyLectures, Summer Semester, 1925 and Experience and Judgment, it may be that Merleau-Ponty did not accept the "eidetic reduction" nor the "pure essence" said to result.Remy C. Kwant, "Merleau-Ponty's Criticism of Husserl's Eidetic Reduction" in Joseph J. Kochelmans, Phenomenology. The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and its Interpretation (Garden City NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1967) at 393–408, 394–395, 404–405. Merleau-Ponty was the first student to study at the Husserl-archives in Leuven.
Gabriel Marcel explicitly rejected existentialism, due to Sartre, but not phenomenology, which has enjoyed a wide following among French . He appreciated Husserl, Scheler, and (but with apprehension) Heidegger.Spiegelberg, Herbert and Schuhmann, Karl (1982). The Phenomenological Movement. Springer. pp. 438–439, 448–449. His expressions like "ontology of sensability" when referring to the body, indicate influence by phenomenological thought.Caponigri, A. Robert (1971). A History of Western Philosophy. University of Notre Dame. Vol. V, pp. 284–285.
Kurt Gödel is known to have read Cartesian Meditations. He expressed very strong appreciation for Husserl's work, especially with regard to "bracketing" or "epoché".
Hermann Weyl's interest in intuitionistic logic and impredicativity appears to have resulted from his reading of Husserl. He was introduced to Husserl's work through his wife, Helene Joseph, herself a student of Husserl at Göttingen.
Colin Wilson has used Husserl's ideas extensively in developing his "New Existentialism," particularly in regards to his "intentionality of consciousness," which he mentions in a number of his books.
Rudolf Carnap was also influenced by Husserl,Smith, D. W., and Amie Thomasson (eds.), 2005, Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, p. 8 n. 18. not only concerning Husserl's notion of essential insight that Carnap used in his Der Raum, but also his notion of "formation rules" and "transformation rules" is founded on Husserl's philosophy of logic.
Karol Wojtyla, who would later become Pope John-Paul II, was influenced by Husserl. Phenomenology appears in his major work, The Acting Person (1969). Originally published in Polish, it was translated by Andrzej Potocki and edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka in the Analecta Husserliana. The Acting Person combines phenomenological work with Thomism ethics.
Paul Ricœur has translated many works of Husserl into French and has also written many of his own studies of the philosopher.Cf., Paul Ricœur, Husserl. An analysis of his phenomenology (Northwestern University, 1967), collected essays, translated. Among other works, Ricœur employed phenomenology in his Freud and Philosophy (1965).Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy: An essay in interpretation (1965; Yale University 1970).
Jacques Derrida wrote several critical studies of Husserl early in his academic career. These included his dissertation, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, and also his introduction to The Origin of Geometry. Derrida continued to make reference to Husserl in works such as Of Grammatology.
Stanisław Leśniewski and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz were inspired by Husserl's formal analysis of language. Accordingly, they employed phenomenology in the development of categorial grammar.Cf.
José Ortega y Gasset visited Husserl at Freiburg in 1934. He credited phenomenology for having 'liberated him' from a narrow neo-Kantian thought. While perhaps not a phenomenologist himself, he introduced the philosophy to Iberia and Latin America.Spiegelberg, Herbert and Schuhmann, Karl (1982). The Phenomenological Movement. Springer. pp. 658–659.
Wilfrid Sellars, an influential figure in the so-called "Pittsburgh School" (Robert Brandom, John McDowell) had been a student of Marvin Farber, a pupil of Husserl, and was influenced by phenomenology through him:
In his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Absurdism philosopher Albert Camus acknowledges Husserl as a previous philosopher who described and attempted to deal with the feeling of the absurd, but claims he committed "philosophical suicide" by elevating reason and ultimately arriving at ubiquitous Platonic forms and an abstract god.
Hans Blumenberg received his habilitation in 1950, with a dissertation on ontological distance, an inquiry into the crisis of Husserl's phenomenology.
Roger Scruton, despite some disagreements with Husserl, drew upon his work in Sexual Desire (1986).
The influence of the Husserlian phenomenological tradition in the 21st century extends beyond the confines of the European and North American legacies. It has already started to impact (indirectly) scholarship in Eastern and Oriental thought, including research on the impetus of philosophical thinking in the history of ideas in Islam.See for instance: Nader El-Bizri, The Phenomenological Quest Between Avicenna and Heidegger (Binghamton, N.Y.: Global Publications SUNY at Binghamton, 2000); and also refer to: Nader El-Bizri, "Avicenna's De Anima between Aristotle and Husserl", in The Passions of the Soul in the Metamorphosis of Becoming, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), pp. 67–89
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