Aron Gurwitsch Archive

Aron Gurwitsch was born in Vilna, Lithuania on January 17, 1901. He grew up in Germany, emigrated to France in 1933, and emigrated again to the United States in 1940. Under the advisement and tutelage of Carl Stumpf, Gurwitsch studied mathematics, theoretical physics, philosophy, and psychology at the University of Berlin, starting in 1919, and then at the University of Frankfurt 1920-1928. Gurwitsch found his philosophical home in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. He spent time studying directly under Husserl and Martin Heidegger in Friedburg 1920-1921. He pursued his dissertation independently, and had it accepted by Professor Moritz Geiger of Gottingen University on August 1, 1928. His dissertation was published in English in 1966, under the title "Phenomenology of Thematics and the Pure Ego: Studies of the Relation between Gestalt Theory and Phenomenology."

His academic career included working as a lecturer at the Institut d'Histoire des Sciences of the Sorbonne from 1933-1940, as a visiting lecturer at Johns Hopkins from 1940-1942, as an instructor at Harvard from 1943-1946, a visiting lecturer at Wheaton College from 1947-1948, as an associate professor at Brandeis from 1948-1959, and finally as a professor at the Graduate Faculty of The New School from 1959-1973. Gurwistsch died in June of 1973.