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Edmund Husserl and His Son Gerhard (April 1929)

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. The founder of the school of philosophy called phenomenology, he anticipated central ideas in the emerging modern disciplines of linguistics, sociology, and psychology. His most famous student was Martin Heidegger, whom he chose to be his successor at the University of Freiburg, and who dedicated his magnum opus, Being and Time, to him. His son, Gerhard Husserl (1893-1973) was a legal philosopher, scholar of comparative law, and co-founder of the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Edmund Husserl emigrated to the United States after being barred from academic posts as a “non-Aryan,” but returned to Germany in 1952, where he held guest professorships at the universities of Cologne and Freiburg.

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Edmund Husserl and His Son Gerhard (April 1929)

Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York