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Perhaps no other 20th century philosopher has held such a wide-ranging influence over the whole of philosophical discourse than the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. ... -- although of Jewish descent, Husserl later characterized himself as a "free Christian," one not bound by the dogmatic ideology of organized religion.

At the University of Leipzig from 1876 to 1878, Husserl studied mathematics, physics, and astronomy. At Leipzig he was inspired by philosophy lectures given by Wilhelm Wundt, one of the founders of modern psychology. Then he moved to the Frederick William University of Berlin (the present-day Humboldt University of Berlin) in 1878 where he continued his study of mathematics under Leopold Kronecker and the renowned Karl Weierstrass. In Berlin, he found a mentor in Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, then a former philosophy student of Franz Brentano and later the first president of Czechoslovakia. There, Husserl also attended Friedrich Paulsen's philosophy lectures. In 1881, he left for the University of Vienna to complete his mathematics studies under the supervision of Leo Königsberger (a former student of Weierstrass). In Vienna in 1883, he obtained his PhD with the work Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations). (+info)

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