Phenomenology in the United States

The article offers a schematic historical account of the reception of Husserlian phenomenology and its offshoots in the United States, tracing the way that earlier disputes over the legacy of Husserl’s work in Germany and France influenced the way that Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Derrida and others came to be read and taught in the United States between 1920 and the present. Focusing on the institutional dissemination of this work against the background of the polarization between “Continental” and “Analytic” philosophy, I argue that phenomenology in the United States today has achieved a certain independence from its originators and represents a distinct way of doing philosophy that can be identified neither as “Continental” nor as “Analytic.”