The Work of Philosophy

Winthrop Pickard Bell studied with Edmund Husserl in Göttingen during 1911–4. During the war he was interned in Ruhleben prison camp, where he gave several public lectures to fellow prisoners. The 1915 lecture entitled “The Work of Philosophy” was given to a general audience and has an introductory character. It articulates a conception of philosophy based upon Husserl’s Göttingen period in two senses. First, unlike several of Husserl’s other students at the time, he fully accepted the transcendental reduction as the basis of a scientific conception of philosophy. Second, Bell furthered Husserl’s Göttingen emphasis on grounding the cultural sciences through his own work on the phenomenology of value.