ABSTRACT
Edmund Husserl was awakened to philosophy by Franz Brentano. His teachings and writings influenced many distinguished works, but even other movements in twentieth-century philosophy, such as analytic philosophy, phenomenological Marxism, existentialism, hermeneutical and personalist philosophy. Both Husserl and his famous colleague, Max Scheler, appreciated the eidetic richness of Rudolf Otto’s Idea of the Holy, in spite of its psychological apriorism. Everything that we know perceptually in the world, what Husserl generically calls a “thing,” is present as an interplay of empty and filled intentions in the context of an ever-wider horizon, which solicits our interest. That is, things present themselves as fully there “themselves” and yet there are spatial and temporal absent aspects that we co-mean but are not directly given. In disengaging the naturalness of the natural attitude Husserl retrieves ancient Aristotelian themes that a task of metaphysics is the study of being as the true.
