Several of the memorial symposiasts have referred to that period in Herbert Spiegelberg's life during which he had cataracts. I, too, remember that period well and would note that he lived his seeing 'phenomenologicaUy.' I remember that as he slowly walked along with me at one SPEP meeting, he hesitated as he had to climb some stairs and remarked, "I have to constitute these steps, one at a time."
Herbert Spiegelberg goes back to the very beginnings of my own professional career. When his The Phenomenological Movement came out in 1960 and only a little later I discovered it, I was just then casting about for a dissertation topic. Already interested in phenomenology, but highly aware of the tone of the times and the dominance of analytic philosophy, his chapter on Paul Ricoeur caught my attention -here was a rational, carefully argued philosopher who ought to be a bridge between what was going on in Europe and what was happening here. And I ended up with a dissertation on Ricoeur, thanks to Herbert Spiegelberg.
By 1964 I had completed and moved to Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and Herbert, ever aware of everyone anywhere interested in phenomenology, invited me to come to Washington University as a guest speaker and part-time participant in his 'workshops.' And although the research paradigms of analytic philosophy certainly were those of 'doing philosophy' albeit in a different mode, Spiegelberg's workshops were another and inventive example of 'doing phenomenology.' Thus, for a second time I found myself in debt to Herbert.
He was, of course, something of an anomaly -clearly one of the most important expositors of phenomenology and its history -and that into the degree of detail that he would have the memorabilia of the movement minutely traced and even reconstructed. He was something of the 'pack rat' of that history. And the monumental The Phenomenological Movement might have left him with what I sometimes call the 'generic Continen-