HUSSERL, EDMUND. — Philosopher and psychologist, born at Prossnitz (Moravia) on 8 April 1859, died at Freiburg im Br. on 26 April 1938. He taught as a privatdozent at Halle (1887), then as a full professor at Göttingen (1906) and Freiburg (from 1906).
H. is the founder of the German “phenomenological school” (Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, Halle, from 1913 onward). On the basis of neo-Kantianism, he restored the terminology and speculative investigations proper to the German scholasticism of the fourteenth century. H.’s phenomenological method consists in studying objects of knowledge as objects of consciousness, or “intentional” phenomena. Sense and intellect, matter and form according to Kant (and Duns Scotus), are merely axial parameters of the method. It considers expression (Bordruck) and its meaning (Anssage) as integral elements of sensible intuition, which is progressively completed in consciousness until it reaches the adequate idea of the phenomenal object. This makes possible two kinds of intellectual, or scientific, investigation: the eletical, or formulation of species (laws, genera of phenomena), and the ancient, or description of regions of being intuited by consciousness beneath the veil of internal and external phenomena, but not capable of being unified, since being in itself is transcendent.
Principal works: Philosophie der Arithmetik, I (Halle 1891); Logische Untersuchungen (2 vols. in 3 parts, there 1900; 2nd ed. there 1913–21; 3rd ed. there 1922); Ideen zu einer Phänomenologie u. phänomenologischen Philosophie, I (there 1913); Formale und transzendentale Logik (there 1929); Méditations cartésiennes (Paris 1931).