James M. Edie

James M. Edie (November 3, 1927 – February 21, 1998) was an American philosopher.

Life and career Edie was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota. He studied at Saint John’s University in Minnesota and at the Pontifical Atheneum of St. Anselm in Rome before obtaining his doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.

Over his career, Edie became an important figure in the publicizing and development of phenomenology in North America. He first taught philosophy for two years at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. In 1961 Edie relocated to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he remained until his retirement, serving as Chair of the Philosophy Department from 1970 to 1977. In 1962, along with John Daniel Wild, William A. Earle, and others, he founded the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). and was a member of the Executive Committee of The International Association for Philosophy and Literature for five years.

Edie was fluent in at least six languages. He authored, co-authored, and edited a large corpus of academic papers and books during his career and, through his translations, introduced English readers to important works of contemporary continental philosophy. He was also the founding editor of Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.

James Edie died of cancer at his home in Sarasota, Florida.

Quotations from Edie's works

On his philosophical interests "I studied, under my professors, a good deal of Husserl and his contemporaries but especially the Logical Investigations. It became clear to me, then, that the principal foci of my philosophical interests were in questions of epistemology and the philosophy of logic, broadly conceived. I had no more interest in the mathematization of formal logic, the creation of an "artificial language," than Husserl himself, but the study of the necessary formal constraints on thinking (and all the usages of language) together with the questions these imply whether in synchronic fact or diachronic history has monopolized my attention, almost to the exclusion of other questions.

"It is said that one's self-presentation is rendered more palatable if one mentions some weaknesses. Well, though I am not as apolitical as Husserl, nor, I hope, as lacking in common sense, questions of social and political philosophy, of value theory in general, and principally theoretical ethics leave me cold. I once told a colleague, who was pressing me: if I ever write on ethical theory, it will be posthumously." — "Self-presentation: James M. Edie", Analecta Husserliana: Vol. XXVI, pp. 208-9.

Major works

Books (authored and edited)

186 pages.

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286 pages.

309 pages.

383 pages.

414 pages.

271 pages. .

150 pages. (cloth), (paper).

104 pages. (trade paper), (paper).

111 pages. (cloth), (paper).

Translations 191 pages.

67 pages.

228 pages.