Husserl's Yearbook

When, in I940, Marvin Farber founded a new periodical which was to become one of the leading philosophical journals in the English-speaking world, he baptized it somewhat clumsily the Journal of Philosophy Phenomenological Research. True, the announcement of a of philosophy needs no further explanation, but the clumsiness of Farber's title resides in the fact that the meaning of the addition and phenomenological is far from clear. Is this type of research something to be done outside the field of philosophy, so that it may perhaps come to be incorporated into it retrospectively? And why speak of phenomenological research, instead of phenomenology tout court? Is there a kind of phenomenology that would not of itself be (phenomenological) research? To the insider, however, it was perfectly clear that the journal's title had not sprung from some erratic whim, but stood for a well-defined program. Farber's title implied that the new journal was to continue Husserl's famous Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und phbnomenologische Forschung the last volume of which had been published only a decade earlier. The resemblance of the two titles was to point to a common underlying intention. What Husserl had done for almost two decades in Germany, Farber wanted to continue on American soil, in an international context under different intellectual conditions, which is to say: offer a platform for scientific philosophy. The journal, as it stated in its introduction, represents no special school or sect.' This echoes the way in which