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Aron Gurwitsch: A Research Guide: Home

This guide introduces and contains resources relating to Aron Gurwitsch, whose personal library (the Aron Gurwitsch Alcove) and Archive are located within the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center.

Portrait Photograph of Aron Gurwitsch

Aron Gurwitsch

Photo Credit: Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Aron Gurwitsch Alcove and Archive. [n.d.]. Aron Gurwitsch Portrait. [Photograph].

Aron Gurwitsch was born in Vilna, Lithuania on January 17, 1901. He grew up in Germany, emigrated to France in 1933, and emigrated again to the United States in 1940. Under the advisement and tutelage of Carl Stumpf, Gurwitsch studied mathematics, theoretical physics, philosophy, and psychology at the University of Berlin, starting in 1919, and then at the University of Frankfurt 1920-1928. Gurwitsch found his philosophical home in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. He spent time studying directly under Husserl and Martin Heidegger in Friedburg 1920-1921. He pursued his dissertation independently, and had it accepted by Professor Moritz Geiger of Gottingen University on August 1, 1928. His dissertation was published in English in 1966, under the title "Phenomenology of Thematics and the Pure Ego: Studies of the Relation between Gestalt Theory and Phenomenology."

His academic career included working as a lecturer at the Institut d'Histoire des Sciences of the Sorbonne from 1933-1940, as a visiting lecturer at Johns Hopkins from 1940-1942, as an instructor at Harvard from 1943-1946, a visiting lecturer at Wheaton College from 1947-1948, as an associate professor at Brandeis from 1948-1959, and finally as a professor at the Graduate Faculty of The New School from 1959-1973. Gurwistsch died in June of 1973.

from Aron Gurwitsch Archive. Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center. https://archives.library.duq.edu/repositories/4/resources/65.

Selected Works by Gurwitsch

Constitutive phenomenology in historical perspective, The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch, Volume 1

Constitutive phenomenology in historical perspective, The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch, Volume 1

1 The present volume is rich in essential phenomenological descriptions 2 and insightful historico-critical analyses, some of which cannot be fully appreciated, however, except by close examination on the part of the reader. Accordingly, such a task ought to be left to the consideration and judgment of the latter, save where such discussions are directly relevant to the topics I will be dwelling upon. I prefer, then, to approach the matters and questions contained here otherwise, namely, archeologically. In this I 3 follow Jose ´ Huertas-Jourda, the editor of the corresponding French vol- 4 ume, in his felicitous terminological choice, although I adopt it here for my purposes in an etymological sense, i. e. , as signifying a return to prin- 5 ciples or origins. This, after all, is consistent not only with the spirit and practice of phenomenology, as acknowledged by Aron Gurwitsch often enough, but as well with what he has actually said, to wit: it is a qu- tion of 1 Cf. , e. g. , infra,in An Outline of Constitutive Phenomenology, Chapter 4, pp. 185 ff. (Henceforth I shall refer to this book as Outline. ) This essay will be devoted to the study of selected parts of the contents of this volume, although, when necessary, use will be made here of other works by various authors, including Gurwitsch. 2 Cf. , e. g. , ibid. , Chapter 3, pp. 107 ff.

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This Guide Created By

This LibGuide originally created by Matthew A. Jones, MLIS, 2019.

SSPC People Collage - People using the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center