Saturday, March 15, 2014
Private Dining Room (Omni Shoreham)
In 1940 Marvin Farber intended to graft Philosophy and Phenomenological Research onto Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung which was originally founded by a group of phenomenology enthusiasts who had gravitated to Husserl during his time at the University of Göttingen. The front material for Volume I of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research lists Gerhart Husserl, who emigrated to the United States with the help of Farber, and five former students of Husserl as editors. Marvin Farber, who studied with Husserl at Freiburg between 1922 and 1924, was listed as editor-in-chief. This volume contains seven contributions from these students, most of whom published in the Jahrbuch. Husserl had been dead for two years but his wish to provide a forum for phenomenology and philosophy was reincarnated only seven years after the demise of the Jahrbuch. Between 1940 and 1980, the year of Marvin Farber’s death, these same students, including Farber, would produce between seventy and eighty articles and reviews. The journal would become a repository of Husserl’s students’ response to his philosophical legacy; it is also a record of the interactions among his students, many of whom provided obituaries and eulogies for their fellows.The objective of this paper is to provide an historical and philosophical account of Husserl’s students’ intellectual production in the journal and to determine to what extent these literary efforts correspond to Husserl’s design for phenomenology.
