THE
INSTITUTE WAS formally established in 1976 and named the
World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning.
It has since that time become well known as the World Phenomenology
Institute, an advanced research institution of international
significance and broad philosophical influence.
The Institute's founding president and principal
intellectual guide for more than three decades is Polish-born
philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, a student of Roman Ingarden and
close associate of Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur. Ingarden,
Levinas, and Ricoeur joined together with other well-known
philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Stephan Strasser in
supporting and advancing Institute programs and publications during
its early years and ever after. It is but one measure of Anna-Teresa
Tymieniecka's personal accomplishment that she has been able to
attract and engage the very best philosophical minds of our time in
Institute programs and publications over thirty years, in large part
as a direct consequence of her own reputation and philosophical
achievement (see WPI Hyperlinks below).
Anna-Teresa
Tymieniecka |
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The Institute was anticipated or might be said to
have had its "pre-history" in an international conference
organized by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and held at the University of
Waterloo in Ontario, Canada in 1969. It proved an event of lasting
significance, one attended by many of the leading philosophers of
the time, including Gadamer and Husserl-Archives director Leo
Hermann van Breda. It was at Waterloo that the first of
three philosophical societies was established which would within
seven years band together to form a World Institute for Advanced
Phenomenological Research and Learning. The International Husserl
and Phenomenological Society (1969) was subsequently joined by
the International Society for Phenomenology and Literature
(1975), and then the International Society for Phenomenology and
the Human Sciences (1976). These societies were the source and
nucleus of the new Institute, and they remain--along with
Institute-affiliated research centers around the world and two
additional societies, the International Society of Phenomenology,
Aesthetics, and Fine Arts (1993) and the Sociedad Ibero-Americana
de Fenomenologia (1995)--a very significant part of Institute
programs and publications to this day.
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Gadamer and
Van Breda at the
Waterloo Congress (1969) |
The Institute was thus established in 1976 for
the purpose of enveloping these scholarly societies in an
encompassing philosophical enterprise and achievement. The success
of that enterprise and the dimension of its achievement over a
thirty-year period may be measured in terms of more than one hundred
international conferences organized by the Institute since its
inception; the more than seventy-five published volumes which now
comprise the Institute's publications list, including sixty-one
volumes (to date) of the world renowned phenomenological research
series, Analecta Husserliana; and innumerable joint research
projects undertaken by Institute research centers, the Boston Forum,
premier research universities, and other advanced research
institutions the world over.
Tymieniecka and Ricoeur
toast
the opening of the
Boston Forum
(1976) |
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It is a history and achievement of which the Institute is
properly proud.
WPI Hyperlinks
Ivanka Rainova, "Interview with
A.-T. Tymieniecka"
A.-T. Tymieniecka, "The Beginnings
and Early History of the World Phenomenology Institute: A Summary of
its First Ten Years"
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