Abstract
In 1927, Winthrop Bell inaugurated the teaching of phenomenology in the English-speaking world, with his course “Husserl and the Phenomenological Movement” at Harvard University. The seminar shows ways to introduce phenomenology to students who have a philosophical background, but who do not yet know phenomenology. Additionally, it reveals phenomenology’s relations to pragmatism, analytic philosophy, and the broader continental tradition. Bell, as the first Anglophone student who wrote his dissertation with Husserl, enjoyed a privileged access to his phenomenological teachers, with whom he studied between 1911-1914, during the time of Husserl’s publication of the Ideen and Scheler’s publication of his Formalism in Ethics. Bell, relying not only on Husserl’s and Scheler’s books but on his own detailed notes from his studies with these founding figures, shows students the germination of the movement, and its most fundamental ideas: its understanding of the a priori and its relation to induction, the nature of intentionality, the relation of idealism and empiricism, along with studies of attention, fulfillment, and meaning. Given phenomenology’s important influences on the North American curriculum, attention to Bell’s seminar can show us how this influence begin, and why phenomenology has become and remained such an important influence in English and in North American philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
See for instance H. T. Costello, Josiah Royce’s seminar, 1913–1914: as recorded in the notebooks of Harry T. Costello. ed. Grover Smith (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP, 1963).
- 2.
Winthrop P. Bell, Eine kritische Untersuchung der Erkenntnistheorie Josiah Royces: Mit Kommentaren und Änderungsvorschlägen von Edmund Husserl. Texte aus dem Nachlass von Winthrop P. Bell (1914/22), ed. Jason Bell and Thomas Vongehr, Husserliana: Edmund Husserl–Dokumente 5. (Dordrecht: Springer International Publishing, 2018).
- 3.
David Mawhinney, Biography of Dr. Winthrop Pickard Bell. Winthrop Pickard Bell: A Mount Allison University Archives Virtual Exhibition (2005), http://www.mta.ca/wpbell/bio.htm. Accessed 5 March 2018.
- 4.
Bell is likely referring here to Albert R. Chandler, “Professor Husserl’s Program of Philosophic Reform,” The Philosophical Review 26, no. 6 (1917): 634–648.
- 5.
A.N. Whitehead, the noted mathematician and philosopher, and collaborator of Bertrand Russell, was at that time recently arrived at Harvard as professor of philosophy. The lectures he gave at Harvard that some of these students may have been familiar with have recently been published; see Alfred North Whitehead, The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead 1924–1925: The Philosophical Presuppositions of Science, ed. Paul Bogaard and Jason Bell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
- 6.
Edmund Husserl to William Hocking, August 3, 1920, Harvard Houghton Library Hocking papers. Also published in Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel Bd. III, 164–165.
References
Bell, Winthrop P. 2018. Eine kritische Untersuchung der Erkenntnistheorie Josiah Royces: Mit Kommentaren und Änderungsvorschlägen von Edmund Husserl. Texte aus dem Nachlass von Winthrop P. Bell (1914/22). In Husserliana: Edmund Husserl–Dokumente, ed. Jason Bell and Thomas Vongehr, vol. 5, 2018. Dordrecht: Springer International Publishing.
Chandler, Albert R. 1917. Professor Husserl’s Program of Philosophic Reform. The Philosophical Review 26 (6): 634–648.
Costello, H.T. 1963. In Josiah Royce’s Seminar, 1913–1914: As Recorded in the Notebooks of Harry T. Costello, ed. Grover Smith. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Husserl, Edmund, and William Hocking. 1920. Harvard Houghton Library Hocking Papers.
Mawhinney, David. 2005. Biography of Dr. Winthrop Pickard Bell. Winthrop Pickard Bell: A Mount Allison University Archives Virtual Exhibition. http://www.mta.ca/wpbell/bio.htm. Accessed 5 Mar 2018.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 2017. In The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead 1924–1925: The Philosophical Presuppositions of Science, ed. Paul Bogaard and Jason Bell. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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Bell, J. (2019). Phenomenology’s Inauguration in English and in the North American Curriculum: Winthrop Bell’s 1927 Harvard Course. In: Ferri, M.B. (eds) The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 100. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99185-6_2
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