Husserl's and Peirce's phenomenologies

coincidence or interaction

pp. 27-50

in: Herbert Spiegelberg, The context of the phenomenological movement, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1982

Abstrakt

Until the late thirties, phenomenology in today's sense of the term was for American philosophy a "foreign affair." To this generalization there is only one possible exception: the phenomenology of Charles Sanders Peirce.² True, the mere absence of the word from the works of other American philosophers does not prove the absence of the thing so designated. Thus the psychology of William James and the philosophy of George Santayana contain many phenomenological ingredients without the trademark. On the other hand, the mere presence of the name "phenomenology" in Peirce's writings constitutes no guarantee that it meant the same thing to him as it did to Edmund Husserl. The principal objective of the present paper is therefore to determine whether and to what extent there is common ground between Peirce's and Husserl's ideas, and whether this ground is sufficient to speak of their phenomenology in the singular.³ In so far as such common ground emerges, I shall also discuss the possibility of mutual influences.