Born in Prossnitz, Moravia (now Prostêjov, Czech Republic) on April 8, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) inaugurated the phenomenological movement in philosophy. Trained as a mathematician at Vienna, where he received his Ph.D. in 1883, Husserl began studying philosophy in 1884 under Franz Brentano (1838–1917) and went on to teach in the philosophy faculties at Halle an der Saale, Göttingen, and Freiburg. His most notable works—Logical Investigations, Ideas (Volumes I, II, and
III), Cartesian Meditations, and The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology—seek a philosophical grounding for mathematics, logic, and science by analyzing the intentional or essential structures of consciousness in its relation to objects in the world relations between subjectivity and objectivity. After his death on April 26 in Freiburg, a substantial body of posthumously published work extended his account of subjectivity and its correlative world into the domain of intersubjective experience, and the development of an...