“Inventing Philosophy’s Other is an ambitious, important, and exceptional . . . first-rate history of American philosophy that reminds us that the ‘best’ ideas don’t simply win out on their merits. Rather, they often come to be labeled as such after their influence is established through the vagaries of institutional contingency. At a time when the line dividing the continental and analytic traditions appears to be wearing thin, we would do well to heed this injunction for historical reflection.”

Los Angeles Review of Books

“Strassfeld is one of the most talented young scholars writing about the history of academic thought. Ambitious and comprehensive, Inventing Philosophy’s Other suggests that the triumph of analytic philosophy in America was neither preordained nor determined strictly on the basis of the quality of thought.”

Bruce Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania

“Strassfeld offers the fullest account yet of phenomenology’s fate in the United States. Revisiting a rich intellectual tradition inspired by the works of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Inventing Philosophy’s Other restores some of the dynamic pluralism of American philosophy, even as it exposes the forces—intellectual as well as institutional—that have railed against it.”

Martin Woessner, City College of New York