A recollection with appreciation

George J. Agich

pp. 239-242

in: Lisa M. Rasmussen, Ana S. Iltis, Mark Cherry (eds), At the foundations of bioethics and biopolitics, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

I first met Tris Engelhardt in the early 1970s at a dissertation defense of a mutual friend at the University of Texas at Austin Philosophy Department. I was working on my PhD there. Tris had completed his PhD there in record time some years earlier and had recently moved from Tulane Medical School to the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) as an Assistant Professor. At a celebratory party for the successful candidate later that evening, Tris and I got into a rather lively discussion about embodiment. He laid out and defended Hegel's categorial treatment. I argued for Merleau-Ponty's account that I thought positively augmented Husserl's. Sometime after that, we began corresponding on the same topic—of course, never really coming to agreement. This correspondence importantly provided me with a link that I used later.

Cited authors

Merleau-Ponty Maurice

Husserl Edmund

Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich