Edmund Husserl

Husserl trained as a mathematician under Weierstrass and Königsberger, then turned to philosophy with Brentano and Stumpf. Early on he dismantled historicism and psychologism in logic through his analysis of intentionality — the idea that consciousness is always consciousness *of* something. He taught at Halle from 1887, moved to Göttingen in 1901, then Freiburg in 1916. In his mature work he pursued what he called the phenomenological reduction, a method to bracket assumptions and examine how transcendental consciousness sets the bounds of possible knowledge. He retired in 1928 but kept worki…