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INTRODUCTION • 5

It was in this historical context that the Franciscan priest Herman Leo van

Breda visited Freiburg shortly after Husserl’s death. Discovering Husserl’sunedited manuscripts and fearful that the Naz is would destroy them, van

Breda decided to arrange for their transport in diplomatic pouches to Leuven,

Belgium, where the Husserl Archives were established. Van Breda also took 8

Malvine Husserl to Belgium where she lived in a convent. As a result of the

hospitali ty and the warmth of the sisters there , M alvine converted to

Catholicism. After the war, she joined her children in the United States. She

eventually returned to Freiburg where she died on 21 November 1950.

Husserl’s career is the story, as he often put it, of “a perpetual beginner.”

We see this not only in the fact that his few published works are repeatedattempts to introduce phenomenology to readers but also in his tendency to

return over and over again to the same questions and the same issues in both

his published works and the tens o f thousand of pages of unpublished

materials. In that regard, his career is the story as well of a philosopher of 

remarkable intellectual honesty who was ready always to revise his views in

the light of continued reflections. Several ideas are central to these repeated

reflections, and Husserl’s rethinking of these themes shall be briefly explored

 by examining three major periods in his career that manifest his perpetual

 beginning, th ree periods that correspond roughly to his tenures at th ree

different institutions.

The Years at Halle (1887–1901)

Husserl served as a Privatdozent at Halle from 1887 until 1901. His writings

during this period address issues in the philosophy of logic and mathematics.

He wrote several essays reviewing developments in the logical theory of his

day and the works o f prominent logicians. His first significant publicationduring this period was the  Philosophie der Arithmeti k (Philosophy of 

 Arithmetic), whose first four chapters are but a minor revision of his

 Habilitationsschrift. But Husserl now extends his project; he seeks to clarify

the relations between mathematics and logic and to consider the possibility

that a philosophical account of mathematics and logic could provide the

foundat ion for all other theoretical sciences insofar as it could serve as a

theory of science. To some extent, then, the  Philosophy of Arithmetic first

embod ies and then shed s the decisive influence of Weierstrass. Like

Weierstrass, Husserl sought a radical grounding for mathematics, but whereasWeierstrass thought this task a mathematical one , Husserl tho ught i t

 philosophical. Unlike Weierstrass , Husserl did no t seek the foundations of 

mathematics in an axiomatic approach, identifying those definitions and

axioms from which the rest of the mathematical sciences could be derived.

Instead Husserl sought to provide an account of those experiences that are