  Weyl was first and foremost a mathematician, and certainly not a  “professional” philosopher. But as a German intellectual  of his time it was natural for him to regard philosophy as a pursuit  to be taken seriously. In Weyl’s case, unusually even for a German  mathematician, it was idealist philosophy that from the beginning  played a significant role in his thought. Kant, Husserl, Fichte, and, later, Leibniz, were at various stages major influences on Weyl’s  philosophical thinking. As a schoolboy Weyl had been impressed by  Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” He was especially taken with Kant’s doctrine that space and time are not inherent in the  objects of the world, existing as such and independently of our  awareness, but are, rather, forms of our intuition As he reports in  Insight and Reflection, (Weyl 1955), his youthful enthusiasm for Kant crumbled soon after he entered Göttingen University in 1904.  There he read Hilbert’s Foundations of Geometry, a tour-de-force of  the axiomatic method, in comparison to which Kant’s “bondage to Euclidean geometry” now appeared to him naïve. After this  philosophical reverse he lapsed into an indifferent positivism for a  while. But in 1912 he found a new and exciting source of  philosophical enlightenment in Husserl’s   phenomenology.[1]  It was also at about this time that Fichte’s metaphysical idealism  came to “capture his imagination.” Although Weyl later  questioned idealist philosophy, and became dissatisfied with  phenomenology, he remained faithful throughout his life to the  primacy of intuition that he had first learned from Kant, and to the  irreducibility of individual consciousness that had been confirmed in his view by Fichte and Husserl.