The Munich-Göttingen School is the most important current of realist phenomenology. To it belong thinkers who — starting from Husserl’s early phenomenology — struck out on their own path: they understood the phenomenological method not as a regress to transcendental consciousness, but as access to the things themselves, to reality as it shows itself. In Munich, Alexander Pfänder taught; in Göttingen, Husserl’s most gifted students gathered: Adolf Reinach, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, and Dietrich von Hildebrand.
What unites these thinkers is the conviction that phenomenology must be a realist philosophy — that it uncovers the structures of reality itself and not merely describes the structures of our consciousness. With this they stand in a fundamental opposition to the transcendental-idealist turn that Husserl himself carried out from the Ideas (1913) onward. Reinach discovered the a priori structures of law, Scheler the material order of values and the material a priori, Stein the constitution of the person in body, soul, and spirit, Conrad-Martius the real ontology of nature, Hildebrand the autonomous lawfulness of moral values and of the value-response.
For the question of personhood, this school is of scarcely overstatable significance. For it has shown that philosophically rigorous, substantive statements about the essence of the person can be made — neither through mere conceptual analysis nor through empirical generalization, but through careful intuition of essences. The synthesis of phenomenology and Thomism, later elaborated above all by Stein, Wojtyła, and Seifert, stands on the shoulders of this school.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology. Bexten 2017, pp. 92–155 (survey of the phenomenological personalists).
Further sources:
- Reinach, Adolf (1913): “Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes.” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung I, pp. 685—847.
- Conrad-Martius, Hedwig (1923): “Realontologie.” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung VI, pp. 159—333.
- Scheler, Max (1913/16): Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Halle: Niemeyer.