Edmund Husserl was born in Moravia, which today is in the Czech Republic. He began his academic life in mathematics at the Universities of Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna, receiving his Ph.D. at Vienna in 1883. In 1884, he attended the lectures of the Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano (1838-1917). Profoundly impressed, Husserl decided to leave mathematics for philosophy. Later, he taught philosophy at Halle, Göttingen, and Freiburg, where he remained until his retirement in 1928. Toward the end of his life, the Nazis banned him from academic activities because of his Jewish roots.
Husserl's early writings were concerned with the nature of mathematics. His first book, Philosophy of Arithmetic, was published in 1891. His interests shifted, partly because of Frege's criticisms of his work, and Husserl developed the idea of phenomenology. His work Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology was published in 1913. After his retirement, he wrote prolifically, but most of these works were published only after his death.
