Abstract
In this chapter, I comment on the organization of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) and on SPEP as an organization by describing its inspirations as an “Openness Toward and Being Other,” its enthusiasm in terms of “Eyes Wide Open,” some dangers and shortsightedness it faced as “Eyes Wide Shut,” the relation of continental philosophy to phenomenology as “Continental Drift,” and the understanding of SPEP as a phenomenological movement as “Edging Beyond Itself.” I conclude with some reflections on the Phenomenology Research Center.
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Notes
- 1.
Edward S. Casey, “Random Reflections of a Founding Witness”, in “The 50th Anniversary Special Issue with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 95.
- 2.
Calvin O. Schrag, “Celebrating Fifty Years of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy”, in “The 50th Anniversary Special Issue with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 91.
- 3.
David Carr, “A Philosophical History of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy?” in “The 50th Anniversary Special Issue with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 103.
- 4.
Robert C. Scharff, “American Continental Philosophy in the Making: The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy’s Early Days”, in “The 50th Anniversary Special Issue with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 111.
- 5.
Carr, “Philosophical History of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy?” 103, 106.
- 6.
Casey, “Random Reflections of a Founding Witness”, 100–101.
- 7.
Scharff, “American Continental Philosophy in the Making”, 111. “Unlike many analytic philosophers, they did not think they could decide all by themselves what contemporary philosophy should be …. Hence, I grew up … assuming that philosophy is necessarily pluralistic, dialogical, and historically determinate all the way down” (110; and see 109–10).
- 8.
Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 93–96; Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 60–62. “By separating, within the Cogito, on the one hand, hyperbole (which I maintain cannot be enclosed in a factual and determined historical structure, for it is the project of exceeding every finite determined totality), and, on the other hand, that in Descartes’s philosophy (or in the philosophy supporting the Augustinian Cogito or the Husserlian Cogito as well) which belongs to a factual historical structure, I am not proposing the separation of the wheat from the tares in every philosophy in the name of some philosophia perennis …. The historicity proper to philosophy is located and constituted in the transition, the dialogue between hyperbole and the finite structure, between that which exceeds the totality and the closed totality, in the difference between history and historicity” (Derrida, Writing and Difference, 60; see Derrida, L’écriture, 93–94).
- 9.
Carr, “Philosophical History of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy?” 104.
- 10.
Sharon M. Meagher, “Feminist Transformations”, in “The 50th Anniversary Special Issue with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 202.
- 11.
Nancy Fraser, “Tales from the Trenches: On Women Philosophers, Feminist Philosophy, and the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy”, in “The 50th Anniversary Special Issue with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 182.
- 12.
Ibid., 178. “The issue is that women philosophers, including women who do Continental philosophy, are often told that they do not really do philosophy. All of SPEP’s members got a taste of what women philosophers face on an almost daily basis in the recurrent attacks by Brian Leiter against SPEP and its membership …. We all were rightly outraged by Leiter’s remarks, but such accusations are regularly hurled at female philosophers, even within what Leiter calls ‘SPEP departments.’ That is, false sweeping generalizations are made and justified on the basis of their being arguments based on merit, when no actual argument is made” (Meagher, “Feminist Transformations”, 207).
- 13.
Donna-Dale L. Marcano, “The Color of Change in Continental Feminist Philosophy”, in “The 50th Anniversary Special Issue with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 211.
- 14.
Ibid., 213.
- 15.
Namita Goswami, “Thinking Problems”, in “The 50th Anniversary Special Issue with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 192.
- 16.
John McCumber, Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought (Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), esp. 1–12.
- 17.
Goswami, “Thinking Problems”, 197.
- 18.
Marcano, “Color of Change in Continental Feminist Philosophy”, 214.
- 19.
Hans-Johann Glock, What Is Analytic Philosophy? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
- 20.
See also the special issue devoted to this work in the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 2, no. 2 (2013) – where there is very little agreement on just what constitutes “analytical philosophy”.
- 21.
See Anthony J. Steinbock, “Limit-Phenomena and the Liminality of Experience”, Alter: Revue de phénoménologie 6 (1998): 275–96. And see Anthony J. Steinbock, Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
- 22.
Fraser, “Tales from the Trenches”, 181.
- 23.
Linda Martín Alcoff and Eva Feder Kittay, “Introduction: Defining Feminist Philosophy”, in The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, ed. Linda Martín Alcoff and Eva Feder Kittay (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 12, quoted in Meagher, “Feminist Transformations”, 209.
- 24.
Linda M. Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 194.
- 25.
Scharff, “American Continental Philosophy in the Making”, 110.
- 26.
One need to consult the website of Organizations Devoted to Phenomenological Research (http://www.husserlpage.com/hus_orgs.html) or the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations membership list (http://opo-phenomenology.org/) in order to witness the wealth of such institutes and centers.
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Steinbock, A.J. (2019). The Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. 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_16
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