FELIX KAUFMANN
(Boxes number 400s)

In addition to the Wagner Papers, the Archival Repository at the University of Memphis contains thousands of documents by other leading American scholars, all of whom drew inspiration from phenomenological theory and methodology. The Felix Kaufmann´s collections includes 29 small, softbound notebooks and 45 larger, hardbound notebooks containing course lectures on such topics as “Dewey’s Logic,” “The significance of mathematics for the social sciences” and “Political Education and Socialism”. Also among the Kaufmann material are numerous essays in various stages of realization (drafts, revisions, hand-corrected typescripts, etc.). These essays include “The Pursuit of Clarity,” “Three meanings of ‘truth’,” “Basic Issues in Logical Positivism,” “What is a scientific problem?” and “John Dewey’s Theory of Inquiry”. Of special interest are Kaufmann’s letters. The Kaufmann Collection contains extensive correspondence between Kaufmann and such figures as Karl Popper, Alfred Schutz (with a detailed catalogue by Helmut Wagner), Eugen Fink, Rudolph Carnap and Arthur F. Bentley. Other correspondents represented in the collection include Bertrand Russell, Jan Patochka, Alfred Tarski, Carl Gustav Hempel, Roman Ingarden, Ludwig Landgrebe and John Dewey. Also included is Kaufmann’s correspondence with members of Husserl’s family (with an accompanying catalogue by José Huertas-Jourdas). Of biographical interest is Kaufmann’s “Memo On Dr. Eugen Fink,” which was written in an effort to secure a visiting professorship for Fink at the New School in spring of 1949, and in which Kaufmann—in addition to lauding Fink as “probably the most gifted living phenomenologist”—provides an account of Fink’s academic career to date (including Fink’s refusal of Heidegger’s offer to help advance Fink’s career in Germany). Another item of interest among the Kaufmann material is a bound lecture notebook containing a typescript of Husserl’s “Die Krisis des europaeischen Menschentums und Philosophie,” dated May 7th, 1935. Included as well is Kaufmann’s 1923 manuscript, Die Idee der logischen Grundwissenschaft, and a manuscript by Heinrich Behmann entitled, Zur Frage der Konstruktivitat von Beweisen, together with correspondence between Kaufmann and Behmann.