425ADVANCING THE DIALOGUE: AN EDITOR’S REFLECTIONSHuman Studies 25: 425–427, 2002.© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Advancing the Dialogue: An Editor’s Reflections

LENORE LANGSDORFDepartment of Speech Communication, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA

In the spring 1969 semester, as a first-year graduate student in philosophy, Ifirst encountered phenomenology within unique circumstances for which Iremain profoundly appreciative. Although I had heard the term before – in itsHegelian context – I arrived at the University of Texas at Austin from a tradi-tional (historically-focused) undergraduate philosophy department without,to the best of my recollection, any recognition of the names of Husserl,Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, or Ricoeur. In retrospect, I suspect thatmy undergraduate department avoided the dominance of analytic philosophythat characterized most philosophy departments at that time by (in effect)ending philosophical history with the nineteenth century. That’s a slight ex-aggeration: we did study twentieth century Philosophy of Science; the Phi-losophy and Literature course introduced existentialism via Sartre; and theAmerican Philosophy course emphasized Dewey.

That limited exposure changed radically in Spring 1969, when I had theextraordinarily good fortune to enroll in a lecture course, Introduction to Phe-nomenology, taught by Richard Zaner, as well as a seminar on the LogicalInvestigations taught by Quentin Lauer S.J., who was visiting from FordhamUniversity. The result was near-total immersion in what was for me a totallynew, and yet immensely compatible, way of thinking – even, an alternativeattitude and very way of being: Husserlian phenomenology. (The immersionis only “near” total because the semester’s work was rounded out by a semi-nar on Marx’s ontology taught by Dieter Hendrich and the auditing of CharlesHartshorne’s seminar in process philosophy).

Very early on, I learned that this new way of thinking and being, phenom-enology, was not “natural.” Dick Zaner solemnly instructed us on this truth.Phenomenology, he said, was “an unnatural act” that enabled us – if we werepatient and diligent in applying ourselves to attending to “the things them-selves” – to discern what was so “natural” as to be unnoticed. More specifi-cally, he carried on the interest of his own teacher, Alfred Schutz, in applyingthat power of discernment to a phenomenology of the social world. This fo-cus would lead him, within a few years, toward the intersection of phenom-enology and clinical ethics, toward describing “the things themselves” asconstituted by being human (even, remaining human) in the midst of medicalexigency, and into using that descriptively warranted knowledge to work for

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more humane medical practices and legislation. His understanding of phenom-enology as criticism (in the most positive sense of reflexive analysis) encour-aged me to continue studying social and political philosophy and to expandthat interest into the philosophy of the social sciences. After graduate school,it led me toward describing “the things themselves” of communicative actionand especially, of the everyday reasoning which enables melioration of thesmall and large ills that beset the human condition (and typically does soagainst opposition). Those expansions were encouraged by a succession ofevents: starting college as a sociology major who became convinced that Plato,Aristotle, and Marx had more to say about society than the sociology taughtin the early 60’s in American universities, and so moving to philosophy; then(in graduate school, by now) reading, almost concurrently, Husserl’s The Crisisof European Philosophy and Transcendental Philosophy and Garfinkel’s Stud-ies in Ethnomethodology; then, arriving at an airport for a meeting of SPEPand sharing a taxi ride to the university with Dick Zaner and his friend, GeorgePsathas. (In the present context, the last name seems superfluous).

At the start of his essay in this essay, George notes that he’d “taken severalphilosophy courses” as an undergraduate, but was told in graduate school “thateven Mead was too much of a philosopher to be of interest to sociologists.There was no encouragement to read philosophy; empirical studies in sociol-ogy were the way to go.” George certainly overcame that lack of encourage-ment. Conversations like the one during that taxi ride launched Human Studiesin 1978 and the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences in 1979.The group of scholars who founded the journal and the society (George tellsus as he summarizes those ventures in his essay) “wanted to be both theoreti-cal and empirical . . . to be interdisciplinary in the very broadest sense thatphenomenology implied, i.e., faithful to the phenomena of study and uncon-cerned with disciplinary boundaries.” The result was a journal “dedicated toadvancing the dialogue between philosophy and the human sciences” (quotedfrom the “Editor’s Statement” in volume one, number one – as noted inGeorge’s and other essays in this anniversary issue – and continuing to beprinted in each issue). “We seek to publish theoretical and philosophical analy-ses,” that Editor’s Statement went on to say, and noted that the journal “espe-cially welcomed empirical studies of the world of everyday life.” During thetwenty years of George’s sole editorship, that blend of the empirical, philo-sophical, and theoretical came to define the journal.

The first journal article I wrote, “Linguistic Constitution: The Accomplish-ment of Meaningfulness and the Private Language Dispute,” was inspired bythe work of Larry Wieder, one of that founding group of scholars, and waspublished in Human Studies in 1983. George invited me to join the EditorialBoard in 1987. By the time he asked me (during a conversation at the 1997SPEP/SPHS meetings) to become Co-Editor, I was profoundly appreciativeof the extent to which the journal had (as Mike Lynch says at the start of his

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essay in this issue) “given visibility to a style of ethnomethodological researchcharacterized by a radical treatment of foundational ‘philosophical’ issues anddebates.” George had nourished (as Maxine Sheets-Johnstone says at the startof her essay) a journal that was “both outstanding and unique. While manyjournals invite or encourage interdisciplinary research that spans the sciencesand humanities, few journals deliver on their promise.” I accepted his invita-tion, and continue now as Editor, convinced of the value of continuing to de-liver on that promise.

Editing Human Studies is an honor, a pleasure, and a continual immersionin interdisciplinary research. Fran Waksler notes (in her Guest Editor’s essayat the start of this issue) that she sees “editorial work as a joint effort of au-thor and editor.” I agree, and would add a third partner: reviewer. The mem-bers of our Editorial Board (and occasional, much appreciated guest reviewers)as well as our authors and guest editors educate me daily; they continuallyexpand the horizons of this sociologist-become-phenomenologist-become-phi-losopher-of-communication further into the many dimensions of the human/social sciences. I’d like to thank these many co-researchers. Most of all I’dlike to thank George, who has encouraged so many of us to think and lookacross disciplinary boundaries and institutional barriers, and who continuesto give his sustaining support to this great adventure in advancing the dialogueso that we might better discern “the things themselves.”

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