The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America

This book presents a historiographical and theorical analysis of how Husserlian Phenomenology arrived and developed in North America. The chapters analyze the different phases of the reception of Edmund Husserl’s thought in the USA and Canada. The volume discusses the authors and universities that played a fundamental role in promoting Husserlian Phenomenology and clarifies their connection with American Philosophy, Pragmatism, and with Analytic Philosophy. 

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 book explores the first encounters between Pragmatism and Husserlian Phenomenology in American Universities. The study focuses, then, on those Scholars who fled from Europe to America, from 1933 onwards, to escape Nazism - Felix Kaufmann, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, Herbert Spiegelberg, Fritz Kaufmann, among the most notable - and illustrates how their teaching provided thevery basis for the spreading of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America. 

The volume examines, then, the action of the 20th Century North-American Husserl Scholars, together with those places, societies, centers, and journals, specifically created to represent the development of the studies devoted to Husserlian Phenomenology in the U.S., with a focus of the Regional Phenomenological Schools.

“This book is more than just a history of the way in which Husserl’s work was studied and taught in the United States and Canada … . The book clearly shows the different phases in the development of the phenomenological movement in North America, the numerous institutions participating in it, and the variety of local perspectives. … the reader will find in this wonderful volume, which might be more exciting than what one would expect at a first glance.” (Carlos Belvedere, Human Studies, Vol. 43 (2), 2020)

Dr. Michela Beatrice Ferri (1983) is faculty at the Holy Apostles College and Seminary (CT, U.S.A.) .  After obtaining a B.A. (2005) and a M.A. (2007) both in Philosophy, she earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2012 at the University of Milan (Italy), with a dissertation dedicated to the first reception of Edmund Husserl's thought in the United States of America. She has been visiting Ph.D. Student at the New School for Social Research in New York (2010) and at the Husserl-Archives in Leuven (2011). She has been visiting researcher at the CSTMS of the University of California Berkeley (2014). Her researches concentrate on the reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in Italy and in the United States of America, on the history of Phenomenology, on Phenomenological Aesthetics, on Modern and Contemporary Aesthetics, on the dialogue between Philosophy, Visual Arts, Architecture, and Cultural Studies, on Aesthetics of the Sacred Art and on Christian Iconography, on Jewish Studies with afocus on history of the Holocaust.

 Dr. Carlo Ierna is currently lecturer in Modern Philosophy at the University of Groningen and the Radboud University Nijmegen, and has recently also been affiliated with the Free University of Amsterdam as well as having been a member of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of the Sciences (2017). After completing his PhD (2009) and a postdoc (2012) at the Husserl-Archives Leuven, he obtained a prestigious Dutch NWO VENI grant to work on the ideal of “Philosophy as Science” in the School of Brentano (2012-2016). He has been visiting fellow at Harvard University (2014) and visiting researcher at the Brentano Archives Graz (2014). His recent work concentrates on the School of Brentano, early phenomenology, and Gestalt psychology, with a focus on symbolic intentionality and the philosophy of mathematics.