Edmund (1859–1938), German philosopher and founder of phenomenology. Born in Prossnits (now Prostejov in the Czech Republic), he studied science and philosophy at Leipzig, mathematics and philosophy at Berlin, and philosophy and psychology at Vienna and Halle. He taught at Halle (1887–1901), Göttingen (1901– 16), and Freiburg (1916–28). Husserl and Frege were the founders of the two major twentiethcentury trends. Through his work and his influence on Russell, Wittgenstein, and others, Frege inspired the movement known as analytic philosophy, while Husserl, through his work and his influence on Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others, established the movement known as phenomenology. Husserl began his academic life as a mathematician. He studied at Berlin with Kronecker and Weierstrass and wrote a dissertation in mathematics at Vienna. There, influenced by Brentano, his interests turned toward philosophy and psychology but remained related to mathematics. His habilitation, written at Halle, was a psychological-philosophical study of the concept of number and led to his first book, The Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891). Husserl distinguishes between numbers given intuitively and those symbolically intended. The former are given as the objective correlates of acts of counting; when we count things set out before us, we constitute groups, and these groups can be compared with each other as more and less. In this way the first few numbers in the number series can be intuitively presented. Although most numbers are only symbolically intended, their sense as numbers is derived from those that are intuitively given. During 1890–1900 Husserl expanded his philosophical concerns from mathematics to logic and the general theory of knowledge, and his reflections culminated in his Logical Investigations (1900–01). The work is made up of six investigations preceded by a volume of prolegomena. The prolegomena are a sustained and effective critique of psychologism, the doctrine that reduces logical entities, such as propositions, universals, and numbers, to mental states or mental activities. Husserl insists on the objectivity of such targets of consciousness and shows the incoherence of reducing them to the activities of mind. The rest of the work examines signs and words, abstraction, parts and wholes, logical grammar, the notion of presentation, and truth and evidence. His earlier distinction between intuitive presentation and symbolic intention is now expanded from our awareness of numbers to the awareness of all sorts of objects of consciousness. The contrast between empty intention and fulfillment or intuition is applied to perceptual objects, and it is also applied to what he calls categorial objects: states of affairs, relationships, causal connections, and the like. Husserl claims that we can have an intellectual intuition of such things and he describes this intuition; it occurs when we articulate an object as having certain features or relationships. The formal structure of categorial objects is elegantly related to the grammatical parts of language. As regards simple material objects, Husserl observes that we can intend them either emptily or intuitively, but even when they are intuitively given, they retain sides that are absent and only cointended by us, so perception itself is a mixture of empty and filled intentions. The term ‘intentionality’ refers to both empty and filled, or signitive and intuitive, intentions. It names the relationship consciousness has toward things, whether those things are directly given or meant only in their absence. Husserl also shows that the identity of things is given to us when we see that the object we once intended emptily is the same as what is actually given to us now. Such identities are given even in perceptual experience, as the various sides and aspects of things continue to present one and the same object, but identities are given even more explicitly in categorial intuition, when we recognize the partial identity between a thing and its features, or when we directly focus on the identity a thing has with itself. These phenomena are described under the general rubric of identitysynthesis. A weakness in the first edition of Logical Investigations was the fact that Husserl remained somewhat Kantian in it and distinguished sharply between the thing as it is given to us and the thing-in-itself; he claimed that in his phenomenology he described only the thing as it is given to us. In the decade 1900–10, through deeper reflection on our experience of time, on memory, and on the nature of philosophical thinking, he overcame this Kantian distinction and claimed that the thing-in-itself can be intuitively given to us as the identity presented in a manifold of appearances. His new position was expressed in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (1913). The book was misinterpreted by many as adopting a traditional idealism, and many thinkers who admired Husserl’s earlier work distanced themselves from what he now taught. Husserl published three more books. Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929) was written right after his retirement; Cartesian Meditations (1931), which appeared in French translation, was an elaboration of some lectures he gave in Paris. In addition, some earlier manuscripts on the experience of time were assembled by Edith Stein and edited by Heidegger in 1928 as Lectures on the Phenomenology of Inner Time-Consciousness. Thus, Husserl published only six books, but he amassed a huge amount of manuscripts, lecture notes, and working papers. He always retained the spirit of a scientist and did his philosophical work in the manner of tentative experiments. Many of his books can be seen as compilations of such experiments rather than as systematic treatises. Because of its exploratory and developmental character, his thinking does not lend itself to doctrinal summary. Husserl was of Jewish ancestry, and after his death his papers were in danger from the Nazi regime; they were covertly taken out of Germany by a Belgian scholar, Herman Leo Van Breda, who, after World War II, established the Husserl Archives at Louvain. This institution, with centers at Cologne, Freiburg, Paris, and New York, has since supervised the critical edition of many volumes of Husserl’s writings in the series Husserliana.
Husserl believes that things are presented to us in various ways, and that philosophy should be engaged in precise description of these appearances. It should avoid constructing large-scale theories and defending ideologies. It should analyze, e.g., how visual objects are perceived and how they depend on our cognitive activity of seeing, focusing, moving about, on the correlation of seeing with touching and grasping, and so on. Philosophy should describe the different ways in which such ‘regions of being’ as material objects, living things, other persons, and cultural objects are given, how the past and the present are intended, how speech, numbers, time and space, and our own bodies are given to us, and so on. Husserl carries out many such analyses himself and in all of them distinguishes between the object given and the subjective conscious activity we must perform to let it be given. The phenomenological description of the object is called noematic analysis and that of the subjective intentions is called noetic analysis. The noema is the object as described phenomenologically, the noesis is the corresponding mental activity, also as described by phenomenology. The objective and the subjective are correlative but never reducible to one another.
In working out such descriptions we must get to the essential structures of things. We do so not by just generalizing over instances we have experienced, but by a process he calls ‘free variation’ or ‘imaginative variation.’ We attempt in our imagination to remove various features from the target of our analysis; the removal of some features would leave the object intact, but the removal of other features would destroy the object; hence, when we come upon the latter we know we have hit on something essential to the thing. The method of imaginative variation thus leads to eidetic intuition, the insight that this or that feature belongs to the eidos, the essence, of the thing in question. Eidetic intuition is directed not only toward objects but also toward the various forms of intentionality, as we try to determine the essence of perception, memory, judging, and the like.
Husserl thinks that the eidetic analysis of intentionality and its objects yields apodictic truths, truths that can be seen to be necessary. Examples might be that human beings could not be without a past and future, and that each material perceptual object has sides and aspects other than those presented at any moment. Husserl admits that the objects of perceptual experience, material things, are not given apodictically to perception because they contain parts that are only emptily intended, but he insists that the phenomenological reflection on perceptual experience, the reflection that yields the statement that perception involves a mixture of empty and filled intentions, can be apodictic: we know apodictically that perception must have a mixture of empty and filled intentions. Husserl did admit in the 1920s that although phenomenological experience and statements could be apodictic, they would never be adequate to what they describe, i.e., further clarifications of what they signify could always be carried out. This would mean, e.g., that we can be apodictically sure that human beings could not be what they are if they did not have a sense of past and future, but what it is to have a past and future always needs deeper clarification. Husserl has much to say about philosophical thinking. He distinguishes between the ‘natural attitude,’ our straightforward involvement with things and the world, and the ‘phenomenological attitude,’ the reflective point of view from which we carry out philosophical analysis of the intentions exercised in the natural attitude and the objective correlates of these intentions. When we enter the phenomenological attitude, we put out of action or