Phenomenology in Practice and Theory e-bog

by Wolfe Mays It is a great pleasure and honour to write this preface. I first became ac- quainted with Herbert Spiegelberg's work some twenty years ago, when in 1960 I reviewed The Phenomenological Movement! for Philosophical Books, one of the few journals in Britain that reviewed this book, which Herbert has jok- ingly referred to as "e;the monster"e;. I was at that time already interested in Con- tinental thought, and in particular phenomenology. I had attended a course on phenomenology given by Rene Schaerer at Geneva when I was working there in 1955-6. I had also been partly instrumental in getting Merleau-Ponty to come to Manchester in 1958. During his visit he gave a seminar in English on politics and a lecture in French on "e;Wittgenstein and Language"e; in which he attacked Wittgenstein's views on language in the Tractatus. He was apparently unaware of the Philosophical Investigations. But it was not until I came to review Herbert's book that I appreciated the ramifications of the movement: its diverse strands of thought, and the manifold personalities involved in it. For example, Herbert mentions one Aurel Kolnai who had written on the "e;Phenomenology of Disgust'!, and which had appeared in Vol. 10 of Husserl's Jahrbuch. It was only after I had been acquainted for some time with Kolnai then in England, that I realised that 2 Herbert had written about him in the Movement. The Movement itself contains a wealth of learning.