Edmund Husserl

William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He was the first educator to offer a psychology course in the U.S. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and... mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James. In the summer of 1878, James married Alice Gibbens. William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
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Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano was an influential German philosopher and psychologist whose influence was felt by other such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Kazimierz Twardowski and Alexius Meinong, who followed and adapted his views. Brentano was born at Marienberg am... Rhein, near Boppard. He studied philosophy at the universities of Munich, Würzburg, Berlin and Münster. He had a special interest in Aristotle and scholastic philosophy. He wrote his dissertation in Tübingen On the manifold sense of Being in Aristotle. Subsequently he began to study theology and entered the seminary in Munich and then Würzburg. He was ordained a Catholic priest on August 6, 1864. In 1865/66 he wrote and defended his habilitation essay and thesis and began to lecture at the University of Würzburg. His students in this period included, among others, Carl Stumpf and Anton Marty. Between 1870 and 1873 Brentano was heavily involved in the debate on papal infallibility. A strong opponent of such dogma, he eventually gave up his priesthood and his tenure in 1873 and in 1879 left the church altogether.
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Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass was a German mathematician who is often cited as the "father of modern analysis". Weierstrass was born in Ostenfelde, part of Ennigerloh, Province of Westphalia. Weierstrass was the son of Wilhelm Weierstrass, a government official, and Theodora Vonderforst. His... interest in mathematics began while he was a Gymnasium student at Theodorianum in Paderborn. He was sent to the University of Bonn upon graduation to prepare for a government position. Because his studies were to be in the fields of law, economics, and finance, he was immediately in conflict with his hopes to study mathematics. He resolved the conflict by paying little heed to his planned course of study, but continued private study in mathematics. The outcome was to leave the university without a degree. After that he studied mathematics at the University of Münster and his father was able to obtain a place for him in a teacher training school in Münster. Later he was certified as a teacher in that city.
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Bernhard Placidus Johann Nepomuk Bolzano October 5, 1781 – December 18, 1848, Bernard Bolzano in English, was a Bohemian mathematician, logician, philosopher, theologian, Catholic priest and antimilitarist of German mother tongue. Bolzano was the son of two pious Catholics. His father,... Bernard Pompeius Bolzano, was born in northern Italy and moved to Prague, where he married Maria Cecilia Maurer, the daughter of a Prague merchant. Only two of their twelve children lived to adulthood. Bolzano entered the University of Prague in 1796 and studied mathematics, philosophy and physics. Starting in 1800, he also began studying theology, becoming a Catholic priest in 1804. He was appointed to the then newly created chair of philosophy of religion in 1805. He proved to be a popular lecturer not just in religion but also in philosophy, and was elected head of the philosophy department in 1818. Bolzano alienated many faculty and church leaders with his teachings of the social waste of militarism and the needlessness of war.
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