  Adolf Reinach was a leading representative of the so-called realist tradition within phenomenology who has been described as Husserl's “first real co-worker in the development of the phenomenological movement” (Willard 1969, p. 194). Although his life was tragically cut short, and his corpus of writings modest in size, Reinach's essays on general ontology, on the philosophy of law and on the philosophy of language, are remarkably clear and original examples of the phenomenological approach to philosophizing. His principal distinction lies in his 1913 monograph “On the A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law”, whose analysis of the act of promising anticipates several crucial aspects of the speech act theories of Austin and Searle.