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Birth of Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl was born April 8, 1859, Prossnitz, Moravia, Austrian Empire to a Jewish family. -
1876
Husserl completed his qualifying examinations in 1876 at the German public gymnasium in the neighboring city of Olomouc. -
Doctor of Philosophy Degree
Edmund studied physics, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy at the Universities of Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna.
He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree with a dissertation entitled ('Contributions to the Theory of the Calculus of Variations") -
Moved
After finishing his degree he moves to Vienna to study with the philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano.
Husserl received a decisive impetus from Brentano and from his circle of students. -
Vienna
In Vienna Husserl converted to the Evangelical Lutheran faith, and one year later, in 1887, he married Malvine Steinschneider, the daughter of a secondary-school professor from Prossnitz. As his energetic and skilled wife, she was his indispensable support, until his death, in all the things of their daily life. -
Habilitation
In 1887 Husserl qualified as a lecturer in the university (Habilitation). The theme of Husserl’s Habilitation thesis, Über den Begriff der Zahl: Psychologische Analysen (“On the Concept of Number: Psychological Analyses”), already showed Husserl in the transition from his mathematical research to a reflection upon the psychological source of the basic concepts of mathematics. -
Göttingen year
Husserl drafted the outline of Phenomenology as a universal philosophical science. Its fundamental methodological principle was what Husserl called phenomenological reduction. It focuses the philosopher’s attention on uninterpreted basic experience and the quest, thereby, for the essences of things. -
1916
His inaugural lecture on “Die reine Phänomenologie, ihr Forschungsgebiet und ihre Methode” (“Pure Phenomenology, Its Area of Research and Its Method”) circumscribed his program of work. He had understood World War I as the collapse of the old European world, in which spiritual culture, science, and philosophy had held an incontestable position. -
1923-1924
In this sense he had set forth in his lectures on Erste Philosophie (1923–24; “First Philosophy”) the thesis that Phenomenology, with its method of reduction, is the way to the absolute vindication of life—i.e., to the realization of the ethical autonomy of man -
Period: to
1924
Upon this basis, he continued his clarification of the relation between a psychological and a phenomenological analysis of consciousness and his research into the grounding of logic, which he published as the Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft (1929; Formal and Transcendental Logic, 1969) -
1933
Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 did not break Husserl’s ability to work. Rather, the experience of this upheaval was, for him, the occasion for concentrating more than ever upon Phenomenology’s task of preserving the freedom of the mind. He was excluded from the university; but the loneliness of his study was broken through his daily philosophical walks with his research assistant, Eugen Fink, -
Last work
Husserl’s last work, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie (1936; The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 1970), only the first part could appear, in periodical for emigrants. The following period until the summer of 1937 was entirely devoted the continuation of this work, in which Husserl developed for the first time his concept of the Lebenswelt (“life-world”) -
to die worthy of a philosopher
From the beginning of 1938 he saw only one remaining task: to be able to die in a way worthy of a philosopher. Not committed to a particular church creed, he had respect for all authentic religious belief, just as his philosophy demanded the recognition of each authentic experience as such. His concept of absolute philosophical self-responsibility stood close to the Protestant concept of the freedom of man in his immediate relationship with God. -
The end of his life
“I have lived as a philosopher,” he said, “and I want to die as a philosopher”—yet, on the other hand, he could explain a few days before his death: “God has in grace received me and allowed me to die.” He died in April 1938, and his ashes were buried in the cemetery in Günterstal near Freiburg.
