Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl ( 1859 – 1938) was a German philosopher, known as the father of phenomenology. His work broke away from the purely positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, giving weight to subjective experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena. Husserl was born into a Jewish family in Prostějov (Prossnitz), Moravia, Czech Republic (then part of the Austrian Empire). Husserl was a pupil of Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf; his philosophical work influenced, among others, Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), Eugen Fink, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Rudolf Carnap, Hermann Weyl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Roman Ingarden.
