Jonathan Strassfeld

Abstract:This article presents a case study in the complex of pressures and attitudes that shaped the professional lives and intellectual legacies of twentieth-century American philosophers, examining the writings and careers of two of the discipline's pioneering women: Ruth Barcan Marcus and Marjorie Glicksman Grene. As members of the small cohort of women trained in philosophy during the first half of the century who achieved permanent academic appointments, their stories illuminate the salience of gender within the professional world of mid-twentieth century American academia.

“Husserl at Harvard: The Origins of American Phenomenology” examines the first interactions between American philosophers and Edmund Husserl, describing a pattern of serious and sustained interest in the phenomenological movement centered at Harvard University during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1902 with W.E. Hocking, at least seven Harvard students had studied with Husserl by 1925. By examining these transatlantic exchanges systematically, this essay argues that Husserlian philosophy enjoyed a promising initial reception in the United States and shows why Harvard was particularly fertile ground for Husserl’s thought.

The history of phenomenology, and its absence, in American philosophy. Phenomenology and so-called “continental philosophy” receive scant attention in most American philosophy departments, despite their foundational influence on intellectual movements such as existentialism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. In Inventing Philosophy’s Other, Jonathan Strassfeld explores this absence, revealing how everyday institutional practices played a determinative role in the development of twentieth-century academic discourse. Conventional wisdom holds that phenomenology’s absence from the philosophical mainstream in the United States reflects its obscurity or even irrelevance to America’s philosophical traditions. Strassfeld refutes this story as he traces phenomenology’s reception in America, delivering the first systematic historical study of the movement in the United States. He examines the lives and works of Marjorie Grene, Alfred Schütz, Hubert Dreyfus, and Iris Marion Young, among others, while also providing a fresh introduction to phenomenological philosophy.