  Personalism in Germany was closely wedded to another philosophical school, phenomenology, developed by Austrian-born Edmund Husserl (1859–1938).  Like existentialism and French personalism, phenomenological realism was partly a response to German idealism, though it bore a distinctive focus on epistemological questions. In his Logische Untersuchungen, published in 1900, as well as his later Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (1913), Husserl laid out his phenomenological method, and through it he attracted the first students of his school. The distinguishing characteristic of phenomenology is not doctrinal, but methodological. Seeking to avoid the imposition of preconceived notions or structures on reality, phenomenology goes “back to the thing” (zurück zum Gegenstand) by bracketing (epoché) all philosophical presuppositions about the world, man, and the rest of reality. This direct observation and consultation of reality eschews the problems of deductive reasoning by focusing on the intellectual act of intuition, or direct apprehension of reality. The eidetic reduction focuses on the essential structures of what appears (phenomenon), so that one is dealing neither with empirical observation nor with a description of Platonic forms, but with the phenomenon’s meaning. Phenomenologists identified the object of intuition as the essences of things, ideal objects, and structures of intentionality and consciousness. In so doing, they sought to overcome the Kantian noumenon/phenomenon dichotomy as well as the errors of positivism and nominalism.