Permit me to begin with some autobiographical remarks. I was trained in Husserlian Phenomenology at the New School during the 1960s by Dorion Cairns as well as Aron Gurwitsch. Husserlian or Constitutive Phenomenology is ultimately a transcendental first philosophy. In it one seeks to ground the world and the special sciences in intersubjectivity as it presents itself when one takes up an attitude of neutrality with respect to its being in the world. I was then persuaded and am now still persuaded that this is the most promising of strategies for first philosophy, provided, that is, it includes the transcendental grounding of value and purpose as well as being.
I am profoundly grateful for the training I received. One among the various reasons for my gratitude has become especially prominent for me in recent years. While most of our contemporaries chiefly devoted their efforts to interpreting the remarkably difficult texts that have come down to us within the phenomenological movement, those of us from the New School were trained by students and followers of Husserl and became confident that, while exegetical problems would no doubt keep coming up, we were on the right track in our comprehension and could hence devote ourselves chiefly to phenomenological investigation rather than scholarship on texts. This is not to say that I have not interpreted, translated, and edited my share of materials, efforts that were needed in the struggle to establish the * The Eleventh Annual Aron Gurwitsch Memorial Lecture, presented under the sponsorship of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology in conjunction with the meetings of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences at