Inventing Philosophy's Other

"Phenomenology was first described by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and developed by a group of thinkers that includes Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The works of these philosophers were a foundational influence on many of twentieth-century Europe's most important intellectual movements, including existentialism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. Yet in most American philosophy departments, phenomenology and the corpus of works branded "continental philosophy" received scant attention. In Inventing Philosophy's Other, Jonathan Strassfeld explores this absence, revealing how everyday administrative needs and institutional practices played a determinative role in the development of twentieth century academic discourse. Conventional wisdom has held that the absence of continental philosophy from America's philosophical mainstream reflects its obscurity or even irrelevance to America's philosophical traditions. Strassfeld refutes this oft-told 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 Schèutz, Hubert Dreyfus, and Iris Marion Young, among others, while also providing an introduction to phenomenological philosophy"--