Prof. Dr. Sebastian Luft will present his and Rodney K. B. Parker’s newly published book Gerda Walther. Toward an Ontology of Social Communities (De Gruyter, 2025) as part of the regular Research Colloquium at the Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists.

Luft, S. & Parker, R. (2025). Gerda Walther. Toward an Ontology of Social Communities: With an Appendix on the Phenomenology of Social Communities. De Gruyter.

Abstract:

This is the first full-text English translation of a seminal book within the phenomenological movement.

The work was orginally published in 1922 in Edmund Husserl’s yearbook Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, and has had a wide impact on work in phenomenology (Husserl, Heideger, Stein) and social ontology. Gerda Walther broaches the topic of social ontology, i.e., a study of social communities. She carries out this task by using the phenomenological method, that is, a study of the first-person (both singular and plural) experience of being a part of a community, what it feels like internally (and its constitutive elements), how it relates to other individuals or other communities, and how unifications between individiuals and communities or between communities take place.

The book is an important contribution to the phenomenology of intersubjectivity or the study of social ontology. Social ontology has been an important and fruitful field of research in contemporary social theory, cognitive science, and other disciplines. It will be a crucial contribution to current research.

• Pioneering study of the nature of the social world
• Author was student of Edmund Husserl
• Important work of early phenomenology

About the translators:

Sebastian Luft is Professor of Philosophy at Paderborn University, Germany. Rodney K.B. Parker is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at King’s University College, Western University, Ontario, Canada.