Edmund Husserl
Born April 8, 1859, Husserl was a prominent German philosopher who is known as the father of phenomenology. He was an idealist who took Kant’s structure for the world (which to Kant, was the product of a transcendent mind that expressed itself in fixed categories of objects in the world) and moved it inward into human consciousness. Husserl showed that the phenomena of the world are created by consciousness and that human beings are part of this consciousness. To Husserl, every human being possesses an “essential intuition” by which we are able to grasp the essence of things.