Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was an influential German philosopher and the principal founder of transcendental phenomenology Husserl was born in Prossnitz, Moravia, in 1859, into an assimilated Jewish family, which gave him a liberal view of religion (in 1886, he was baptized as a Lutheran and remained religious but nonconfessional for the rest of his life). Husserl did not excel in high school but eventually developed an interest in astronomy, which he pursued at the University of Leipzig, and mathematics, which he studied in Berlin and then in Vienna, where in 1882 he received a PhD with a dissertation on the calculus of variation. Husserl found particular inspiration in the teachings of two remarkable scholars: the mathematician Karl Weierstrass (1815-1897) at the University of Berlin and the philosopher Franz Brentano (1838-1917) at the University of Vienna. Husserl's writings have been said to combine Weierstrass's rigorous scientific thinking and Brentano's insights into human…