Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl ( HUUSS-url, US also HUUSS-ər-əl, German: [ˈɛtmʊnt ˈhʊsɐl]; 8 April 1859 – 27 April 1938) 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 expelled from 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.
Quotes
- “I must achieve internal consistency.” ― Edmund Husserl
- “I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.” ― Edmund Husserl
- “First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must “once in his life” withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom (sagesse) is the philosophizer’s quite personal affair. It must arise as His wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute insights.” ― Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology
- “To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.” ― Edmund Husserl
- “Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people.” ― Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
- “In our vital need … science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the question which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions about the meaning or meaninglessness of this whole human existence. Do not these questions, universal and necessary for all men, demand universal reflections and answers based on rational insight? In the final analysis they concern man as a free, self-determining being in his behaviour toward the human and extrahuman surrounding world and free in regard to his capacities for rationally shaping himself himself and his surrounding world.” ― Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
- “All forms of perception, according to Husserl, presuppose an intentional structure of consciousness, and it is in this intentional structure that the primordial link between consciousness and the world is to be sought.” ― Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness