When and where was Edmund Husserl born?
Edmund Husserl was born on the 8th of April 1859 in Proßnitz, a town in the Margraviate of Moravia within the Austrian Empire.
Edmund Husserl was born on the 8th of April 1859 in Proßnitz, a town in the Margraviate of Moravia within the Austrian Empire.
The year 1884 marked a turning point when he attended lectures by Franz Brentano at the University of Vienna. Brentano spoke about intentionality as the defining feature of mental phenomena which became central to all future work. Husserl decided to dedicate his life to philosophy after hearing these lectures.
On the 6th of April 1933 Edmund Husserl was banned from using any library at the University of Freiburg or other academic institutions due to racial laws enacted by the National Socialist German Workers Party. Public outcry forced authorities to reinstate him the following week but damage had already been done. In July 1933 Husserl resigned from the Deutsche Akademie rather than compromise his principles.
By summer 1929 however Husserl studied selected writings of Heidegger and concluded they differed fundamentally because Heidegger substituted Dasein for the pure ego transforming phenomenology into anthropology. This shift represented psychologism strongly disfavored by Husserl himself. In lectures delivered during 1931 he included pointed criticism of Heidegger's work.
His widow Malvine became instrumental in smuggling approximately 40,000 pages of stenography to Belgium in 1939. These manuscripts formed the basis for the Husserliana critical edition series published decades later.