Background
Gurwitsch, Aron was born on January 17, 1901 in Wilna, Russia. Son of Meyer and Eva (Bloch) Gurwitsch.
Gurwitsch, Aron was born on January 17, 1901 in Wilna, Russia. Son of Meyer and Eva (Bloch) Gurwitsch.
Student of University Berlin, 1918-1921, U. Frankfurt, 1921-1928. Doctor of Philosophy, University Goettingen, 1928.
Came to the United States, 1940, naturalized, 1946. Research fellow Prussian Ministry Sciences, Arts and Public Instruction, Berlin, Germany. 1929-1933; lecturer Institut d’Histoire des Sciences Sorbonne, Paris, 1933-1940.
Research fellow Caisse Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, 1939-1940. Visiting lecturer philosophy Johns Hopkins, 1940-1942. Instructor physics Harvard, 1943-1946.
Visiting lecturer mathematics Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, 1947-1948. Assistant professor mathematics Brandeis U., 1948-1951, associate professor philosophy, 1951-1959. Professor philosophy Graduate Faculty Political and Social Science New School for Social Research.
New York City, 1959-1973. Fulbright Exchange professor philosophy U. Cologne (Germany), 1958-1959. Visiting professor philosophy Columbia, 1962, U. P.R., 1963, U. Mainz (Germany), 1968.
Ernbree, Lester (1972) LifeWorld and Consciousness. Essays for Aron Gurwilsch, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ~~~et al. (1981) ‘The phenomenology of Gurwitsch’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 12, 2, May. ~~—(ed.) Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch, University Press of America. Gurwitsch’s work consists of a continuation and expansion of Husserlian phenomenology in the light of Gestalt theory, organismic biology, interpretive sociology, genetic psychology, neoKantianism, existentialism and the history of modern philosophy. He was led thereby to transform Husserl’s theories of the object, attention, perception, thinking and, especially, the ego His Habilitation thesis. Human Encounters in the Social World, which was first published in German in 1977, is his only work on social interaction. It may be that, after 1932, he abandoned social theory to Alfred Schütz whose phenomenology, unlike his own, attributes an essential social dimension to being human. His major work. The Field of Consciousness (1957), is a phenomenological development of the insights of William James. Jean Piaget, the analytical psychologists, the Gestaltists and Kurt Goldstein's organismic biology. The field of consciousness is shown to be divided into three zones: thematic object, thematic field and marginal field. The marginal field is the subject of his Marginal Consciousness (1985), which was originally intended to be a section of The Field of Consciousness. Phenomenology and the Theory of Science (1974) consists of ten essays and compilations from 1937-1973. For Gurwitsch, science includes natural science, the human sciences and the formal sciences. The book is the expression of his aim to ground these sciences in constitutive phenomenology. The problem is that of a transition from the protologic of the lifeworld to the strict concepts of science. One of his final works, Leibniz: Philosophic des Panlogismus (1974), is the result of decades of interest and research. ‘Panlogicism’ is the view that logic is somehow realized in the structure of the world, and for Leibniz this means that an intelligible contexture of monadic substances underlies phenomena. For Gurwitsch this involves an irreducible correlation of subject and object. Sources: Lester, Embree (1973) ‘Aron Gurwitsch (1901-1973)’, obituary, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 4: 291.
Member American Association University Professors, American Philosophical Association, International Phenomenological - Society (member of council), Society Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, History of Science Society, Societe Francaise de Philosphie.; Member editorial board Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1940. Member editorial board Man and World, 1968.
Married Alice Stern, April.