Phenomenology and Pragmatism: A Recent Encounter

Although phenomenology and pragmatism have developed as entirely independent philosophical traditions, in recent decades a philosophical encounter between these two philosophies has emerged, overcoming to some extent a longstanding mutual exclusion. The early mutual exclusion that was especially pronounced in the United States was based on misunderstandings on the part of members in each tradition. According to its typical misunderstandings, the phenomenological tradition has little to contribute to pragmatism and, similarly, pragmatism is precisely the kind of philosophy that phenomenology rejects. Pragmatists, focusing on the concepts of intuition, essence, and constitution in phenomenology, have misinterpreted these as leading to idealism, to subjectivism, or to mysticism. Misunderstandings of the nature of the pragmatic focus on science have led phenomenologists to view pragmatism as reductionistic, psychologistic, and naively realistic in its interpretation of the findings of modern physics. In this way both phenomenologists and pragmatists have alleged that the other’s framework retains elements of past traditions rejected by their own contemporary philosophy. Hence, pragmatism and phenomenology are even today still considered primarily in terms of their disparate traditions.