Preface to W. R. Boyce Gibson’s Freiburg Diary 1928

Abstract

To most students of phenomenology William Ralph Boyce Gibson (1869–1935) will be known only as the translator of Edmund Husserl’s Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie and phänomenologischen Philosophie I (1913) under the title, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1931). This pioneer feat, however imperfect, undertaken by an accomplished British philosopher in his own right, has a remarkable history worth knowing for its own sake.² Probably the decisive phase occurred in Freiburg in 1928, where Boyce Gibson spent more than a semester of his sabbatical year from the University of Melbourne, Australia. This timing made him a witness of the transition from Husserl to Heidegger as the occupants of the most important phenomenological chair in German Philosophy. How unique a witness he was can now be shown on the basis of his Freiburg diary.

From the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 2, No. 1, January, 1971, pp. 58–62.