Eugen Enyvvari’s road to Göttingen and back: A case study in the Transleithanian participation in early phenomenology (with an appendix of Edmund Husserl’s two unpublished letters to Enyvvari)

Abstract

Despite attending Husserl’s classes, participating in the discussions of the Gottingen phenomenological circle, and writing prolifically on phenomenology, Eugen Enyvvari (1884–1959) seems to have been virtually ignored by phenomenological scholarship. I use an array of unpublished sources and a survey of his juvenilia to reconstruct Enyvvari’s biography and intellectual formation, including his confrontation with Melchior Palagyi’s critique of Husserl and Bolzano. Based on both his reports and records from the Gottingen University Archives, I attempt to establish the influences to which he could have been exposed in Gottingen. I rely on a careful micro-analysis of the development of Husserl’s notion of noematical meaning at the time of Enyvvari’s stay in Gottingen in order to asses Enyvvari’s specific contribution to phenomenology and his significance from the point of view of the general historiography of phenomenology.