Massimo Cisternino

The paper uses the Neo-Kantian distinction between Natural and Human sciences and its methodological implications to navigate W. E. B. Du Bois’s and Alain L. Locke’s theories of race. In tracing a continuity between these two figures, the paper also shows how their respective reliance on Neo-Kantian categories leads them to different results. The goal is to show how, while Du Bois’s Neo-Kantianism is best understood as a Diltheyan Neo-Kantianism of the psycho-physical unity of human nature influenced by an anti-metaphysical orientation, Locke’s Neo-Kantianism can be seen as a Neo-Kantianism whose focus is the rejection of causality and of the causal nexus between biological and non-biological traits.

The paper investigates the role played by pre-scientific experience in the philosophy of Josiah Royce and Edmund Husserl. Such a notion, generally associated with Husserl’s conception of the life-world (Lebenswelt) in the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), finds an equivalent and historical antecedent in Royce’s distinction between a world of description and a world of appreciation. The final goal is to show how, despite their different philosophical frameworks, Royce and Husserl agree on the idea that, through the rejection of the world given through mere perception (Lebenswelt/world of appreciation), European sciences have somehow failed their task of universality. As it will be shown, this idea is also due to methodological affinities among the two thinkers. The experience of interconnectedness among individual minds, while precluded in the mere scientific explanation of the world, it becomes possible through the enactment of the Lebenswelt or, as in Royce’s case, through a return to the experience of the world of appreciation.

This essay presents a historiographical analysis of how Husserlian Phenomenology arrived and developed in North America. The paper focuses on authors and universities that played a fundamental role in promoting Husserlian Phenomenology. Starting from the analysis of how the first American Scholars of Edmund Husserl's thought opened the door to the reception of his texts, the analysis explains the first encounters between Pragmatism and Husserlian Phenomenology in American Universities, and then illustrates about those Scholars who fled from Europe to America, from 1933 onwards, to escape Nazism – Felix Kaufmann, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, Herbert Spiegelberg, among the most notable – by explaining how their teaching provided the very basis for the spreading of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America. The action of the 20th Century North-American Husserl Scholars involves places, societies, centers, and journals, specifically created to represent the development of the studies devoted to Husserlian Phenomenology in North America.