Introduction

Abstract

Adolf Reinach, born in Mainz, in the year 1883, has been called Husserl’s “first real co-worker in the development of the phenomenological movement” (Willard, 1969, p. 194). He was the only student of Husserl to complete a Habilitation and to join him as a teacher in Göttingen, and as Spiegelberg notes, independently of each other “the Göttingen students of phenomenology like Wilhelm Schapp, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Alexandre Koyré, and Edith Stein, in their accounts of this period refer to Reinach, not to Husserl, as their real teacher in phenomenology” (1982, p. 191). Edith Stein writes of the seminars that Reinach led: “We students probably all agreed that we were here more than anywhere else learning about philosophical method” (Crosby, ed., p. xxviii). Referring to these same seminars, Roman Ingarden says that Reinach

was the very heart of our collective efforts, the active spirit opening up new aspects and paths of investigation in a creative attitude which never rested, never lost its grip in difficult situations. Thus one was brought by him to the attitude of creative philosophising and one could enjoy the participation in the development of a new philosophy, though one was in fact merely a philosophical child. (Mulligan, ed., p. 17)

Spiegelberg notes that “Reinach’s importance for the development of early phenomenology is particularly remarkable considering the brief life span of 34 years granted him for the development of his ideas and his influence.” He further speculates that it “was his death in action in 1917 rather than Husserl’s going to Freiburg which cut short not only his own promise but that of the Göttingen phenomenological Circle” (p. 192).