Contributions To Phenomenology In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology Volume 100 Series Editors Nicolas de Warren, Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA Ted Toadvine, Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA Editorial Board Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA Rudolf Bernet, Husserl Archive, KU Leuven, Belgium David Carr, Emory University, GA, USA Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University Hong Kong, China James Dodd, New School University, NY, USA Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University, FL, USA Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa, Italy Burt Hopkins, University of Lille, France José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University Hong Kong, China Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University, Korea Rosemary R.P. Lerner, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Peru Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne, Germany William R. McKenna, Miami University, OH, USA Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, OH, USA J.N. Mohanty, Temple University, PA, USA Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo, Japan Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis, TN, USA Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Germany Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy Anthony Steinbock, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL, USA Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University, Japan Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University, TN, USA Scope The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other fields of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published more than 80 titles on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to welcoming monographs and collections of papers in established areas of scholarship, the series encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and depth of the Series reflects the rich and varied significance of phenomenological thinking for seminal questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach of phenomenological research. The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5811 Michela Beatrice Ferri Editor The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America In Collaboration with Carlo Ierna Editor Michela Beatrice Ferri Holy Apostles College and Seminary Cromwell, CT, USA In Collaboration with Carlo Ierna ISSN 0923-9545 ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic) Contributions To Phenomenology ISBN 978-3-319-99183-2 ISBN 978-3-319-99185-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99185-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018968119 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To Lester Embree who died on the 19th of January 2017, while this volume was under revision. Starting from the Spring of 2010 I have had the benefit of his supervision during my researches devoted to the history of the reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America. I am sure that together with me each contributor of this volume knows how immense was Lester Embree’s desire to see this book published. Preface Edmund Husserl conceived and developed his phenomenology during the final years of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth centuries, in the brilliant intellectual environment – mathematical, psychological, philosophical – of Austria and Germany, in the cities of Vienna, Berlin, Halle, Gottingen, and Freiburg, in conversation with Karl Weierstrass, Franz Brentano, Georg Cantor, David Hilbert, and Wilhelm Dilthey. Husserl lived in a scholarly world, but the academy was obvi- ously only part of a larger setting. The last three decades of his life were profiled against monumental historical events: the First World War, its chaotic aftermath, and the National Socialist tyranny that led to an even greater world conflict, which began in the year following his death in 1938. Husserl’s philosophical thought, being an achievement of the mind, was able to lift itself beyond its given place and time, but it came into being in a place and at a time, in the company of certain indi- viduals, and in a particular cultural and historical setting. This book describes how his philosophy was displaced from its central European origins to the much larger geographic location of North America, and how it was received there, in the more diverse academic population of that part of the world. The book is an exercise in hermeneutics. It studies how a complex ideal meaning can be constituted and exercise its effects, not just where and when it originates but also in different minds and situations, and how it can remain identifiable even while being modified in its new environment. § I The title of the book speaks not of Husserl’s Phenomenology but of Husserlian Phenomenology; it uses an adjective and not a noun. The book examines a topic that is wider than Husserl’s own thought, and many other authors in this philosophical and cultural movement are examined. Husserl, however, is not just one among the many. He is the strategic and pivotal center, the one without whom it would not have come together as an identifiable whole. Even more, he is not just the necessary vii viii Preface condition but the font and origin. He was influenced by others but his mind was not an inflection of someone else’s; he was the philosophical self-starter and paradigm who gave what we know as phenomenology its celebrated name and its substantial form. Most of us are acquainted with fragments of the phenomenology in North America. We know several scholars and some institutions and journals, and we are vaguely aware of various other components, but we are most likely not sure who or what these others are and how they fit in. This book, in contrast, offers us the com- plete picture, rounded out in all its details and showing all the connections in time and space. It fills in the gaps and tells us what we should know about people and things that might have been just names or shadows to us. The reception of this philo- sophical way of thinking is not just a theoretic achievement but also a rich and var- ied intellectual history. The transmission of Husserlian Phenomenology to North America can be described as having taken place in four successive waves. The first, described in the first four chapters of this book, occurred in the years before the First World War. It involved especially the universities of Harvard and Göttingen, the reciprocal philo- sophical interest between Josiah Royce and Husserl, and two Harvard students who went to Germany to study with Husserl, William Ernest Hocking, who studied briefly with him in 1902–1903, and the Canadian scholar Winthrop Packard Bell, who studied and wrote his dissertation with him in 1911–1914. Both Hocking and Bell subsequently taught at Harvard, the former in a lifetime career and the latter for only a short time. There was another Harvard philosophy student who had a more incidental and merely literary contact with Husserl at that time, T. S. Eliot, who reports in one of his letters that he spent the month of August 1914 “immured” in Marburg reading the Logische Untersuchungen.1 Because of the outbreak of war, Eliot left Germany for Oxford without having met Husserl. We will speak of him later. The second wave took place during the 15 or so years after the First World War. It involved a number of noted American scholars, again mainly from Harvard, who studied with Husserl at Freiburg and then returned to North America and repre- sented his thought there, figures such as Dorion Cairns, Marvin Farber, and John Wild. The third wave in the transmission of Husserlian Phenomenology, however, moved in the opposite direction. It involved not American scholars going to Europe but Europeans emigrating to North America in the 1930s, under the totalitarian and anti-Semitic regime in Germany in the years leading up to the Second World War. Dietrich von Hildebrand, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, and Herbert Spiegelberg could be mentioned among them. Finally, we can distinguish a fourth wave of transmission that took place after the end of the Second World War. Husserl himself was no longer there, but the Husserl- Archives had been established at Leuven, Cologne, Freiburg, and Paris, and 1 The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 5: 1930–1931, ed. Valerie Eliot, John Haffenden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 644, letter to Martin D’Arcy S.J., 19 August 1931.