5 Was North America Fertile Ground for the Early Phenomenological Movement?

Phenomenology arrived in North America during the first decades of the 20th century. On the continent, it had flourished particularly where the terrain had been prepared by the School of Brentano. Did something similar occur in North America or were the background and context completely different? I will try to show the possible role of some of the competing elements in the late 19th and early 20th century that favoured and opposed phenomenology in North America. Despite significant German influences, North America was not receptive to phenomenology in the beginning. Philosophy and psychology were closely connected, in Germany as well as the US, but the prevailing imported approaches of Wundt and Herbart were not congenial for the reception of Brentano and Husserl. Moreover, Husserl’s work was initially taken up in the context of debates about realism in the US, with limited interest in the original contributions of his phenomenological method.