Edmund Husserl and the Crisis of Europe‪.‬

I EDMUND HUSSERL (1859-1938) was the last great European rationalist, albeit a unique and even paradoxical one: the father of phenomenology but also of existentialism; the Cartesian whose researches in the end eviscerate the cogito; the mathematician-logician whose ultimate concern was spirit. The final phase of his thought, like the final phase of his life, unfolded in Nazi Germany in the years just prior to the Second World War. The memory and shadow of the Great War of 1914-1918 were still fresh, the essential historical meaning of which had yet to be understood, and which could never be understood: