Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was a German philosopher who founded phenomenology, a movement that systematically investigates the structures of conscious experience.

Intentionality: The directedness of consciousness toward objects, meanings, or states of affairs. Husserl made intentionality a central structure through which phenomenology analyzes experience.
Phenomenological description: A careful account of how phenomena are given in experience, before explaining them causally. Description is how Husserl’s inquiry makes structures of experience available for analysis.
Franz Brentano: An Austrian philosopher who revived the study of intentionality and taught Husserl in Vienna. Brentano’s account of intentionality helped shape Husserl’s initial conception of mental phenomena.
Martin Heidegger: A German philosopher whose analysis of human existence transformed phenomenology into fundamental ontology. Heidegger studied with Husserl and became his assistant before developing a distinct approach.
Phenomenology: A philosophical movement and method that investigates structures of conscious experience as they appear. Husserl founded the movement whose later branches both extended and contested his program.
Phenomenological reduction: A method of suspending assumptions about the existence of the world to examine how it appears in experience. Husserl used this suspension to redirect inquiry from worldly claims to conscious experience.
Eidetic variation: A thought experiment that varies an example to identify features necessary to its identity. Husserl used imaginative variation to distinguish essential structures from accidental details.
Bernard Bolzano: A Bohemian mathematician and philosopher whose work on logic and propositions influenced later philosophy. Bolzano’s objective treatment of logical content informed Husserl’s early anti-psychologism.
Edith Stein: A German philosopher and phenomenologist whose work addressed empathy, personhood, and the state. Stein was Husserl’s research assistant and extended phenomenological analysis of empathy and social life.
Cartesian Meditations: Husserl’s 1931 lectures on transcendental phenomenology, intersubjectivity, and the constitution of an objective world. The work presents his mature attempt to ground shared reality in transcendental subjectivity.

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