ABSTRACT
Introduction Like his contemporaries Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, Husserl began his academic life as a mathematician. He studied mathematics at the universities of Leipzig, Berlin (where he was taught by both Kronecker and Weierstrass), and Vienna, where in 1882 he received his PhD for a dissertation entitled ‘Contributions to the Theory of the Calculus of Variations’. Although he had in fact studied philosophy as a subsidiary subject-in Leipzig, for example, with Wilhelm Wundt-there is little evidence that his interest in the subject was, during this period, more than cursory.1 And in 1883 he left Vienna for Berlin to take up a post as assistant to Weierstrass. At this time he felt himself to be, according to his wife, ‘totally a mathematician’.2
