ABSTRACT
In the early 1950s, various academics from professional faculties at several Dutch universities had begun to approach their fields in a phenomenological manner. The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Eugène Minkowski, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty had become an inspiration for academics in the professional disciplines to approach their own professional interests in new and exciting perspectives. Scholars such as the pedagogue Martin Langeveld (1983), the medical doctor Frederik Buytendijk (1970a, 1970b), the psychiatrist Jan Hendrik van den Berg (1966, 1972), the pediatrician Nicolas Beets (1952/75), and the psychologists Hans Linschoten (1987) and Henricus Rümke integrated phenomenological themes into the very languages and structures of their professional disciplines. They largely shied away from discussing theoretical, methodological, and technical philosophical issues. As Langeveld declared emphatically, they were primarily interested in phenomenology as an applied and reflective enterprise, not in phenomenology as theoretical philosophy. Some had participated in seminars with Husserl and Heidegger, and many of these proponents found inspiration in the works of, and maintained correspondence with phenomenologists such as Max Scheler, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Romano Guardini, Helmuth Plessner, Ludwig Binswanger, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eugène Minkowski, Georges Gusdorf, and Paul Ricoeur.
