Phenomenology’s Inauguration in English and in the North American Curriculum: Winthrop Bell’s 1927 Harvard Course

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.