FRED KERSTEN
Fred Kersten
In the spring of 1954, I graduated from college with a major in philosophy and minors in German, Spanish, and medieval history. I was uncertain where to continue my studies until one of my teachers in college, Herbert Spiegelberg, gave me a copy of “The New School Bulletin of Courses of Study of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science for 1954–1955.” Spiegelberg was especially enthusiastic about the New School’s graduate program because of a faculty that included Dorion Cairns, Alfred Schutz, and Werner Marx.
Persuaded by “The New School Bulletin,” I enrolled in the Graduate Faculty in the fall of 1954. In addition to studying with Cairns, Schutz, and Marx, by the time I left the New School in 1964 I had also had the privilege and good fortune of studying with Sidney Morgenbesser, Ruben Able, Arnold Brecht, Horace Kalen, Eugene Kullman, Albert Solomon, Hans Jonas, Richard Kennington, and Aron Gurwitsch. Together they provided me with a thorough and invaluable scholarly foundation in various branches of Hellenic, Hellenistic, medieval, modern, and contemporary philosophy. Suggested and directed by Alfred Schutz, my MA thesis focused on Miguel de Unamuno.1 My doctoral dissertation focused on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and was under the direction of Dorion Cairns.2 Although I have long since extensively revised some of the results of these early studies, much of the results remain as the core of almost all my later scholarship and teaching.
Now over fifty years later I still have vividly welcome memories of my teachers in the Graduate Faculty. All were highly gifted and notable scholars. A few became lifelong friends. They provided me with the best imaginable education, which stood me in good stead for the rest of my life. Whatever success I have had, and whatever pleasure I have derived from the adventure of ideas, I owe to them collectively but also individually. But I cannot recall them without, at the same time, bringing to mind the enthusiastic, tightly knit, and dedicated group of students they attracted, some of whom also became lifelong friends. Together, under the magnificent murals of Orozco in the New School cafeteria, we formed a Philosophy Club—complete with an elaborate set of rules and a ridiculous oath—that sponsored a lecture series (including a fine set of lectures by Dorion Cairns).
After receiving my PhD in philosophy, I finally entered the academic world, where I spent the best part of thirty years teaching courses in philosophy as well as specialized areas of the humanities. My own research and publication has taken me into various areas of Husserlian phenomenology, and in turn, that research enabled me to carry out research in fields as diverse as the history of science, music and musicology, the nature of literature and fiction, and the foundations of the social sciences. In addition, I have had the privilege of translating into English and publishing some works of Husserl, Gurwitsch, and Schutz.
Although my teaching has, for the most part, been confined to undergraduate college courses, I have taken pride in the success of some students who, with good training in philosophy, have pursued successful careers in academia as well as in business, in the medical professions as well as in organized religion, in law as well as in law enforcement, and in the arts as well as in the physical and social sciences. As one of my teachers once remarked, “the promise of a new generation is the satisfaction of the old.”
I cannot close without mentioning the creator of the Graduate Faculty and the New School, Alvin Johnson. He was one of the two inventors of a new kind of university in the twentieth century whom I have had the privilege of meeting. And his transformation of the University in Exile into the Graduate Faculty bore out the truth of Verdi’s statement about Palestrina, “Return to the past—that would be progress!”
NOTES
1. Fred Kersten, “The Philosophy of Miguel de Unamuno” (master’s thesis, The New School, 1959); sadly, Schutz died before I could put the final touches on the thesis. The great Spanish philosopher, Professor José Ferrater Mora, teaching at Princeton at the time, generously undertook the final direction of the thesis.
2. Fred Kersten, “The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl” (PhD diss., The New School, 1964).