Abstract

Of great philosophical import, albeit yet to be entirely enlarged upon, has been the encounter between European phenomenology and American thought that took place in A.-T. Tymieniecka’s evolution of classical phenomenology into the phenomenology of life, her creation. When she arrived in the United States in the 1950s, Tymieniecka became convinced that it was necessary to move forward from the later Husserl, in order to endow phenomenology with the more immediate pertinence and practical functionality that the American environment demanded to philosophical and scientific thought. In effect, the phenomenology of life that Tymieniecka developed in her over 40 years in America, brought about a positive hybridisation of the American pragmatic attitude and Continental phenomenology, enhancing this last with regard to the methodological approach to knowledge and the relationship with science, and launching it into the search for new epistemic and ontological horizons, away from sterile speculativism. Her discovery of the ontopoietic logos of life as the propulsive and ordering force intrinsic in life, enabled her to break through the opposing prejudices of phenomenology and pragmatism, and to embark upon a theory in which the synergy between the phenomenological attitude and the practical attitude reached a high level of efficiency.