At the Existentialist Cafe begins in Germany after the first world war, with Edmund Husserl and his pupil Martin Heidegger.

The other afternoon, Pierce was at the London Library, examining a weathered edition of “Logische Untersuchungen,” by the philosopher Edmund Husserl.

Although his greatest intellectual hero was Friedrich Nietzsche, his work was also inspired by the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.