Abstract

In what seems to have been his last paper, Insight and Reflection (1954), Hermann Weyl provides an illuminating sketch of his intellectual development, and describes the principal influences—scientific and philosophical—exerted on him in the course of his career as a mathematician. Of the latter the most important in the earlier stages was Husserl’s phenomenology. In Weyl’s work of 1918-22 we find much evidence of the great influence Husserl’s ideas had on Weyl’s philosophical outlook—one need merely glance through the pages of Space-Time-Matter or The Continuum to see it. Witness, for example, the following passages from the former.