Some remarks on phenomenology’s past

I recall distinctly the mood of intellectual euphoria at my encounter with phenomenology. I was an undergraduate at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, a new philosophy major, and I was taking an introduction to the subject. Robert Sokolowski’s Introduction to Phenomenology had recently appeared (as had Dermot Moran’s Introduction), and I think the first text we read was another assigned source, David Cerbone’s Understanding Phenomenology. In a few weeks, I had a vague sense of things. Heidegger had been Husserl’s heir apparent, but then came philosophical disagreement between them, and eventually betrayal and a falling-out. Sartre was the one who most famously brought Husserl and Heidegger to France, but he didn’t agree with either of them. And there also was this fourth guy, Merleau-Ponty, who was a friend of Sartre’s for a time till they too had their own parting of the ways. There was personal and historical intrigue. But above all, there was an overwhelming sense that thiswas true...