ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the central engagements between phenomenology and pragmatism and neopragmatism. It shows that the manner in which William James’s account of consciousness with its fringes and horizons helped shape Edmund Husserl’s conception of intentionality, thereby moving him significantly beyond his erstwhile teacher Franz Brentano. The chapter examines the way Martin Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s practical being-in-the-world has been interpreted in the neopragmatism of Robert Brandom, Richard Rorty and others. Phenomenology emerged as a distinctive new movement in German philosophy with the publication of Husserl’s Logical Investigations in 1900/1901. In Germany during the 1930s, the intellectual atmosphere changed radically. Thus German philosophers of all stripes from Ernst Cassirer and Rudolf Carnap to Adorno and Alfred Schutz had to flee Germany. The philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, a student of Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s mentor, was responsible for introducing James to the Brentanian school of descriptive psychology.
