To whom it may concern

the question of the philosophic interlocutor

José Huertas-Jourda

pp. 229-240

in: Robert Stufflebeam (ed), To work at the foundations, Berlin, Springer, 1997

Abstract

§1. The theme of this essay presented itself to me as a consequence of the work I did preparing a computer-copy of Professor Aron Gurwitsch's "Paris lectures" of 1937 for possible publication. This, the last remaining unpublished major manuscript of Prof. Gurwitsch's was, needless to say, entirely new to me. And it is this unfamiliarity which led me to my theme, because, in the years intervening since these lectures were given, the tone and quality of philosophic discourse have changed so that the contrast between the text before me and that to which I was perforce accustomed brought home the question: "to whom are these widely different discourses addressed?" I shall attempt, in what follows to give textual excerpts in order to provide an experience of the contrast of which I speak. My aim is not polemical, merely illustrative, and this only in order to formulate more precisely the question with which these texts presented me, with the complementary aim of assessing what answer, if any, the Paris lectures provide to it. Let us begin by turning to what I take to be representative of the manner and quality of philosophic discourse today.

Cited authors

Gurwitsch Aron