Herbert Spiegelberg: From Munich to North America

The chapter contains a brief intellectual biography of Herbert Spiegelberg, building on his numerous autobiographical remarks. It provides a survey of Spiegelberg’s early life and works and his German period, focusing more exten-sively on his American period. The chapter considers in some detail three important themes in Spiegelberg’s works. First, Spiegelberg’s role in spreading and develop-ing the phenomenological method in the United States through the organization of his workshops, based on ideas from his teachers Reinach and Pfänder to phenome-nologize “co-subjectively”. Second, his life-long concern with the development of a phenomenological ethics and the detailed development of the core notion of “deontic state of affairs” (Sollverhalt). Last but not least, his monumental contribu-tion to the historiography of phenomenology with his The Phenomenological Movement. The chapter takes a critical look at the early controversies with Farber on the idea of a phenomenological “movement” in order to clarify and qualify Spiegelberg’s own conception of phenomenology. The chapter is meant as a com-panion piece to the translation of Karl Schuhmann’s unpublished article “Phenomenological Ontology in the Work of Herbert Spiegelberg: Ideas and Ontic and Deontic States of Affairs” which will appear in the second volume.