Abstract

Though available for some time, this specialized Encyclopedia has received relatively scant attention in the philosophical press. Husserl Studies and Alter have printed in-depth reviews, but the concision and probity of the 166 entries comprising the volume, authored by leading specialists from the increasingly international phenomenological movement, merits further assessment. Under the direction of chief editor Lester Embree of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and ten assistant editors, the Encyclopedia is the product of a five-year gestation period of research, writing, and editing. Embree briefly details the history and structure of the volume in a two-page preface. In a ten-page introduction, Embree and J.N. Mohanty explain phenomenology through five broad tendencies common to all phenomenological schools, and acknowledge four primary fields of endeavor: realistic, constitutive, existential, and hermeneutical phenomenology. This is followed by a cursory history of phenomenology, its early relation to neo-Kantianism, and the three twentieth century philosophical movements with which phenomenology, in Husserl’s wake, has had fruitful encounter: Marxism, psychoanalysis, and analytic philosophy.