On introducing phenomenology: An evaluation of some texts

Abstract

In the fall of 1960, my first semester of graduate work in the United States, I spent an inordinate amount of time preparing a term paper for one of my courses, that on epistemology. The instructor was an eminent philosopher, long since retired, who was known to have little sympathy for either of the two broad principal currents of contemporary philosophy--namely, the amalgam of linguistic analysis and logical positivism that dominated Anglo-American thinking, and the converging existentialist and phenomenological movements that prevailed in Continental Europe; this man's tolerance both for unclarity and for unexplicated technical jargon was exceedingly low. I had decided to produce, as my project, a sympathetic synopsis of the thought of Edmund Husserl, which I took to be preeminently epistemological in its concerns. At the time, the enterprise was not an especially easy one. I had already read a great deal of Sartre, some Merleau-Ponty, a little Heidegger, plus a bit of Polin and other less well-known figures. The previous spring I had attended a course given by Canon Raymond Vancourt of the Facult~s Catholiques of Lille; at Vaneourt's urging, I had prepared a report, for the seminar, on Marvin Farber's dense but still valuable paraphrase (in English) of Husserl's early work, entitled The Foundation of Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and the Quest for a Rigorous Science of Philosophy (I 943). I had also obtained some further sense, although (as was obvious even at the time) an unreliable one, of the development of the phenomenological movement from reading two of Vancourt's own very religiously oriented books, now nearly forgotten, La Philosophie et sa structure: philosophie et phbnombnologie and La Phbnomknologie et lafoi. I knew enough, then, to recognize Husserl's tremendous importance and the fact that he was seminal with respect to some of the great continental philosophers of the next generation who were then still in their primes, but I had received little guidance as to details. In those days, the corpus of philosophical works in English offered very little such guidance indeed. A glance at the Husserl bibliography in Herbert Spiegelberg's magisterial two-volume study, The Phenomenological