Adolf Reinach

metaethics and the philosophy of law

Edmund Husserl

pp. 327-346

in: John Drummond, Lester Embree, Phenomenological approaches to moral philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2002

Abstract

Adolf Reinach was born in Mainz, Germany, in the year 1883. Though it was Johannes Daubert who first introduced the students of Theodore Lipps to Husserl's Logical Investigations, it is Reinach who has rightly been called Husserl's first real coworker. He was the only person to complete a Habilitationsschrift and join Husserl as a teacher at Göttingen. Independently of each other, most students of phenomenology of that time—including Wilhelm Schapp, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Alexandre Koyré, and Edith Stein—referred to Reinach, not to Husserl, as their real teacher in phenomenology. Indeed, Spiegelberg once speculated that it was Reinach's death in 1917, rather than Husserl's move to Freiburg, that cut short the life of the Göttingen circle of phenomenology.