ABSTRACT
BARRETT, WILLIAM William Barrett (1913-92), for many years Professor of Philosophy at New York University, was one of the most broadly based and learned philosophers of the twentieth century. He earned his doctorate at Columbia University with a dissertation on Aristotle’s Physics. He is generally credited with introducing existentialism to the U.S. in his 1947 Partisan Review article, ‘‘What is Existentialism?’’ But he was far from thinking of existentialism as mainly an exotic French import. For example, in his famous Irrational Man (1958), he described William James as being as much an existentialist as a pragmatist. Barrett was greatly learned in the whole history of philosophy and enjoyed tracing existential themes throughout this history.
