ABSTRACT
Edmund Husserl was born in Prossnitz in Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now part of the Czech Republic. Classifying philosophers in terms of Marx's aphorism about understanding and changing, one can say that whereas the Frankfurt thinkers are all 'changers', Husserl returns us to the mould of understanding for its own sake, the mould of Max Horkheimer's 'traditional theory'. Phenomenology, as David Woodruff smith usefully puts it, is the description of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view – as contrasted with neuroscience which studies it from the third-person point of view. The inspiration behind the phenomenological reduction is René Descartes' method of doubt. While acknowledging his debt, however, Husserl observes that Descartes himself was not a good phenomenologist. Lifeworld experience is based on sense perception. Everything that shows up in the lifeworld as a 'concrete thing' has, Husserl claims, a bodily aspect.
