Husserl on Phenomenology

• The life of Edmund Husserl resembles, at crucial points, that of Sigmund Freud. Husserl was three years younger than Freud. Like him he was born into a Jewish family in Moravia, and attended lectures in Vienna. Both men devoted the greater part of their lives to a personal project that was intended to be the first really scientific study of the human mind. At the end of their lives both men fell foul of Nazi anti-semitism, with Freud driven out of Austria to die in exile, and Husserl's books burnt by German troops marching into Prague in 1939.
• Husserl's professional life, however was quite different from Freud's. His initial studies were in mathematics and astronomy, not in medicine. He went on to pursue an orthodox academic career in philosophy, holding posts in a succession of university departments. 
• Husserl initially focused his attention on mathematics. His habilitation thesis at Halle was on the concept of number, and his first book published in1891, was The Philosophy of Arithmetic. This sought to explain our numerical concepts by identifying the mental acts that were their psychological origin.
• Because of his desire to find a basis for mathematics in empirical psychology, Husserl was forced into some unattractive conclusion. He denied, for instance, that zero and one were numbers. 
• Reviewers of Husserl's book, notably Frege, complained that it contained a confusion between imagination and thought. The mental events that were the subject matter of psychology, being private to the individual, must rest on thoughts that were the common property of the race. Husserl yielded to the criticism and abandoned his early psychologism.
• Two things are essential to a thought: that it should have a content and that it should have a possessor. Suppose that I think of a dragon. Two things make this the thought it is: first, that it is the thought of the dragon and not of an eagle or a duck; second, that it is my thought and not your thought or Napoleon's thought. Husserl would mark these features by saying that it was an act of mine with a particular matter. Other people, too, may think of dragons; in that case, for Husserl, we have several individual acts belonging to the same species. The concept dragon, in fact, is nothing other than the species to which all such acts belong.
• Phenomenology was developed during the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1900 Husserl was appointed to an associate professorship at the University of Gottingen. There he had as a colleague the renowned mathematician David Hilbert, but his most enthusiastic collaborators in his new venture were a group of philosophers at Munich, who coined the phrase 'Phenomenological movement'. By 1913 the movement was self-confident enough to publish a yearbook for Phenomenological research. In the first issue of this appeared a book-length text of Husserl's, which was planned as the first volume of a work to be entitled Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology.
• Husserl believed, when I see a table, the intentionality of my experience is just the same whether there is real table there or if I am hallucinating.
• Phenomenology is not the same as Phenomenalism. A phenominalist believes that nothing exists except phenomena, and that statements about such things as material objects have to be translated into statements about appearances. Berkeley and Mill held versions of Phenomenalism. Husserl, on the other hand, did not assert in Ideas that there are no realities other than phenomena; he deliberately left open the possibility that there is a world of non-phenomenal objects. Only, such objects are no concern, or at least no initial concern, of the philosopher. The reason for this is that according to Husserl, we have infallible immediate knowledge of the objects of our own consciousness while we have only inferential and conjectural information about the external world. Husserl made a distinction between immanent perception, which was self-evident, and transcendent perception. Which was fallible, immanent perception is my immediate acquaintance with my own current mental acts and states, of physical things and events, and of the contents of other peoples minds.
• At Freiburg his lectures attracted a wide international audience, and he had among them highly influential soon to be philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Edith Stein.