Nicholas de Warren, Bina Gupta, J. N. Mohanty, Michael Barber, Jorge Garcia Gomez, Sara Garcia Gomez. Back row: James Dodd, Thomas Seebohm, Lester Embree, William McKenna, Osborne Wiggins, Thomas Nenon. Photo by Lester Embree.
This volume is about the teaching and study of phenomenological philosophy in the Department of Philosophy of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Research at the New School for Social Research in New York City from 1954 to 1973. This was the first doctoral program with this emphasis and arguably played a major role in the introduction and defense of phenomenology into North America. Other important teachers—from Karl Löwith to Rainer Shurmann, and especially Werner Marx—were there as well and influenced the students of this period. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that J. N. Mohanty and Thomas Seebohm were almost able to continue the tradition, this period was chiefly the time when first Alfred Schutz and Dorion Cairns and then, after Schutz’s death in 1959, Cairns and Aron Gurwitsch taught how Edmund Husserl’s philosophy could be continued. I call these phenomenologists “the New School Three.” But there was also the influence of Maurice Natanson on other students, both before they came to the school and afterward, to such an extent that he almost counts as one of the teachers; for this reason this volume is dedicated to his memory.
What is distinctive about the New School Three is that, in addition to contributing some scholarship in the forms of interpretations and translations of Husserl’s works, their principal efforts were devoted to—in Gurwitsch’s phrase—“advancing the problems,” which is to say that they focused on contributing originally to Husserl’s constitutive phenomenology. In addition, because these three not only shared a common source in the mature Husserl but also interacted with one another, they can be said to have formed a historical tendency. One can seriously ask whether theirs is not the only such tendency of original phenomenologizing in the United States to have developed. Practically all other “phenomenologists” in the United States are scholars who teach and write about phenomenology on the basis of literature that had been published in Europe. They rarely if ever engage in actual phenomenological investigation.
This project began as a conference of the same title at the Graduate Faculty of the New School in March 2007. A set of living New School students who had remained in contact with one another to various extents was invited to tell of their experiences of coming to and being at “the school,” and then to describe or provide a sample of their work since then. In addition, Michael Barber, Thomas Nenon, and George Psathas were invited to write on the deceased colleagues Alfred Schutz, Werner Marx, Maurice Natanson, and Helmut Wagner, whom they had as teachers and friends, while several of the New School students also wrote about their teachers.
I thank the original publishers for the following three reprinted texts: Aron Gurwitsch, “On the Object of Thought: Methodological and Phenomenological Reflections,” in The Phenomenology of the Noema, edited by Lester Embree and John Drummond (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), 9–27 (reprinted with kind permission of Springer Science+Business Media); Alfred Schutz, “Positivistic Philosophy and the Actual Approach of Interpretive Social Science: An Ineditum of Alfred Schutz from Spring 1953,” Husserl Studies 14, no. 2 (1998): 123–49; and Werner Marx, “The ‘Need of Philosophy’—An Historical Reflexion,” Universitas: A German Review of the Arts and Sciences 21, no. 4 (1979): 295–303.
Furthermore, I thank Professor James Dodd of the New School and the Philosophy Department there for arranging the conference from which this volume has grown. Moreover, I thank my research assistants, Dr. Daniel Marcelle and Mr. Elliot Shaw, for help in ways too many to list. Finally, I thank the living teachers and the students for their efforts at documenting phenomenology at the New School in its golden age and some of its consequences while it can still be done.
Lester Embree
Delray Beach,
July 2014