Edmund Husserl
1859-1938

                     Husserl is the father of phenomenology. Born in the former Czechloslovakia, Husserl studied in Leipzig,
                     Berlin and Vienna, where he also taught. He began his studies as a mathemetician, but his studies were
                     influenced by Brentano, who moved him to study more psychology and philosophy. He wrote his first book
                     in 1891, The Philosophy of Arithmetic. This book dealt mostly with mathematical issues, but his interests
                     soon shifted. Husserl immersed himself in the study of logic from 1890-1900, and he soonafter produced
                     another text: Logical Investigations(1901).

                     Some of his major ideas of this era were intentionality, relations, and identity of things. He came to focus on
                     perceptual experience, and as he began to shed his early Kantian ways, he wrote Ideas Pertaining to a
                     Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy(1913). His last three books were Formal and
                     Transcendental Logic(1929), Cartesian Meditations(1931), and Lectures on the Phenomenology of
                     Inner Time-Consciousness(1928), a group of lectures he compiled and edited. His lectures and essays
                     comprise a large amount of his works.

                     Husserl attempted to shift the focus of philosophy away from large scale theorization, towards a more
                     precise study of discrete phenomena, ideas and simple events. He was interested in the essential structure
                     of things, using eidetic analysis of intensionality to yield apodictic(necessary) truths.

                     Husserl aided philosophy, breaking the Cartesian trap of dualism with new ideas like intensionality. He was
                     perhaps the most important force in revitalizing 20th century continental philosophy.