Husserl’s Way into Phenomenology for Americans: A Letter and Its Sequel

Abstract

The two letters here published were discovered around 1963 by Professor Margaret Van de Pitte of the University of Alberta at Edmonton, at that time a graduate student at the University of Southern California, “in a cardboard folder stacked on a shelf with a few others not related to phenomenology” at the School of Philosophy of the University. I am greatly indebted to her for having drawn my attention to this exchange between E. Pari Welch and Edmund Husserl and for additional helpful inquiries. However, her efforts to find out why the forgotten letters had landed and remained there were unsuccessful. One can only surmise that Welch, who at the time was a Ph.D. candidate at the School, had taken them there and never reclaimed them. The two letters were preceded by a separate page with the title “Letter concerning phenomenology by Edmund Husserl in Answer to a Communication by E. Pari Welch.”