1In their preface to the first collection of Pos’s writings, published two years after his death, Karl Kuypers and Jan Aler sadly note that “as long as [Pos] was alive, his vivid and captivating personality lent unity, vigor, and intensity to the manifestations of his thought. Now that he is no longer among us as a source of spiritual life, we have nothing left but traces—numerous indeed, but scattered—of his activity.”1 Many similar testimonies agree on the vital role of Pos’s own person as a unifying factor in relation to a body of work that remained very fragmented and a way of thinking that was scarcely systematic.2 All emphasize that Pos was above all a man of dialogue, debate, and encounter, who throughout his life sought to unite his pursuit of theoretical and objective knowledge with political convictions and an ever-growing engagement in society. His intellectual activity was thus marked by a constant pedagogical and communicative dimension, clearly expressed in the highly dynamic and dialectical nature of his thought. Refusing to formulate a systematic theory in a synthetic work, Pos preferred to give substance to his ideas through a multitude of articles, lectures, courses, and letters which, taken together, amount to the arguments of a dialogue characterized both by contradiction and by the ideal of a constructive exchange with thinkers of the past as well as of the present.

2Even without wanting to make Pos’s thought too directly dependent on the particular circumstances of his life or on the accidents of his personal journey, it is clear that knowledge of the essential elements of his biography can prove very useful—both for situating in its concrete context the implicit dialogue with himself and with others that constitutes Pos’s work, and for grasping the stakes of its often deliberately paradoxical development. These elements are in fact quite well known, but until now they have been presented only in Dutch, by Daalder (1990) and Derkx (1994), which is why it is worthwhile to revisit them here in detail.

3Born on July 11, 1898, in Amsterdam, Pos attended the Reformed Gymnasium (Gereformeerd Gymnasium) in his native city before undertaking studies in classical literature at the Free University (Vrije Universiteit), also in Amsterdam. Responding very positively to the teaching—tinged with Calvinism, neo-Kantianism, and neo-Hegelianism—he received there, particularly from the philosopher Jan Woltjer, Pos oriented himself from that time toward an idealist conception of language and an approach to linguistic analysis resistant to the empirical dogmas of the Neogrammarians. Moreover, he became very actively involved in university life, enthusiastically participating in several student societies of the faculty.

4During the academic year 1920–1921, Pos went to Heidelberg to study philosophy under Heinrich Rickert and Heinrich Maier. In 1921, he successfully defended his first doctoral dissertation, Zur Logik der Sprachwissenschaft (The Logic of Linguistics). In this already highly accomplished work, he sought to apply the principles of Rickert’s theory of knowledge to general linguistics, with the aim of clarifying its epistemological stakes and providing it with a unified methodological foundation. In doing so, Pos independently of Saussure developed a profound philosophical reflection on language and linguistics which, in many respects (though not, of course, in terms of its impact), stands comparison with the Cours de linguistique générale and opens interesting perspectives on the neo-Kantian genealogy of the structuralist paradigm.3

5After a year spent teaching in Haarlem, Pos returned during the winter semester of 1922–1923 to Germany, to the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, where he attended the lectures of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Hermann Ammann. He enthusiastically embraced the ideas of Husserlian phenomenology, which he freely used to reorient his own approach to language in a less schematic and more “realistic” perspective—or at least one more attentive to the diversity of empirical manifestations of linguistic phenomena. In order to obtain a chair of classical philology at the Free University of Amsterdam, he prepared a second dissertation—this time phenomenological in inspiration—which he defended in 1923, not under Husserl’s supervision but indeed in Amsterdam, under the title Kritische Studien über philologische Methode (Critical Studies on Philological Method).

6After another interlude in his native country, Pos undertook a third stay abroad, this time in Paris, where he met his future wife, the Frenchwoman Marcelle Honig (with whom he had no children). At the Sorbonne, he attended, among others, the seminars of Antoine Meillet and Joseph Vendryes. Yet despite a deep affinity with French culture—which would never fade—Pos noted that his stay in Paris had been far less influential for his intellectual development than his previous visits across the Rhine and his encounter with German philosophy.

7In 1924, Pos was appointed professor of general linguistics—a chair created especially for him—at the Free University of Amsterdam. He quickly gained among his colleagues and students a reputation as an excellent speaker and an inspired, attentive teacher. His teaching and research were then devoted to the philosophy of language (a field which for him was equivalent to general linguistics—a discipline at that time clearly distinct from historical-comparative linguistics) and to the epistemology of the human sciences. He pursued his reflections—imbued with neo-Kantianism and phenomenology—on linguistics and epistemology, seeking among other things to account for the relationship between the disordered yet original multiplicity of subjective or “pre-theoretical” linguistic data and the objective, unified form dependent on an ideal a priori norm that language takes on in reflection or theoretical knowledge. On these questions he published a work in the original form of a dialogue, Inleiding tot de taalwetenschappen (Introduction to the Language Sciences), as well as a series of significant articles: “Algemene taalwetenschap en subjectiviteit” (General Linguistics and Subjectivity), “Vom vortheoretischen Sprachbewusstsein” (Pre-Theoretical Linguistic Consciousness), and “De eenheid der syntaxis” (The Unity of Syntax).

8At around this same time, Pos joined the intellectual society Unitas Multiplex, founded among others by Jan Romein,4 with whom Pos later became friends. Politically rather conservative until then, Pos was through this connection introduced to Dutch communist and liberal circles. In 1926, he was indirectly involved in a major religious controversy that stirred the Reformed Church of the Netherlands following the suspension of Johannes Geelkerken, the pastor of Pos’s parish.5 Pos took Geelkerken’s side, which earned him numerous difficulties within the highly dogmatic Free University. As a result, he decided to leave the institution in 1932 to take up the chair of theoretical philosophy and the history of philosophy at the Municipal University of Amsterdam (Gemeentelijke Universiteit van Amsterdam), a position he would hold until his death. In the same period, Pos abandoned his wavering Christian faith in favor of a social humanism.

9At the Municipal University of Amsterdam, Pos deepened his preferred themes—language and the theory of knowledge—but oriented his work within a philosophically broader and more comprehensive perspective. He thus dealt with the history of philosophy (Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Comte, Marx, Bergson) and with problems of philosophical method. His studies on German idealism led him to address themes such as the historicity of consciousness and of science, and to question his initial neo-Kantian conviction in the absolute and timeless nature of the transcendental norms of a priori knowledge. These doubts, which did not, however, lead him to definitively reject the idealist neo-Kantian teaching, are expressed most clearly in articles such as “Het apriori in de geesteswetenschappen” (The A Priori in the Human Sciences), “Metaphysik” (Metaphysics), “Kennisleer” (Theory of Knowledge), and “Phénoménologie et linguistique,” a work that Roman Jakobson later described as a “beautiful study.”6 Within this context of intense questioning about the relative status of the ideality of knowledge and experience occurred Pos’s fruitful encounter with Prague phonology, which he discussed in “Quelques perspectives philosophiques de la phonologie” and “Perspectives du structuralisme.” All these texts—together with his last book, Filosofie der wetenschappen (The Philosophy of the Sciences)—bear witness to a phase of broadening in Pos’s thought, reflected in the more philosophical treatment he gave to the relationship between the transcendental norms of a priori knowledge and empirical experience, as well as in his interest in certain more general functions of language (for example, as an instrument for expressing thought or affect, as a tool for the symbolic mastery of reality, or as a vehicle for the development of mind and society).

10During the 1930s, Pos further consolidated his academic reputation, which gradually acquired an international dimension. He thus participated in all the international linguistics congresses of the interwar period, where he met almost all the representatives of the new structural linguistics,7 and, according to Jakobson, “played a leading role in the creation of a phenomenology of language and of the theory of structural linguistics.”8 He also took part in international congresses of philosophy (Prague, Paris), psychology (Paris), and phonetics (Amsterdam), where he met numerous figures (Gaston Bachelard, Émile Bréhier, Léon Brunschvicg, as well as Karl Bühler). As early as 1929, he had attended the famous Davos Debate and made contact with Ernst Cassirer there. From 1936 onward, at the invitation of his friend Romein, he became president of the Comité van Waakzaamheid (Committee of Vigilance), an anti-Nazi association that at the time brought together leading Dutch intellectuals and over a thousand members. In this capacity, he emerged as a progressive and engaged intellectual, taking an active part in the political life of the 1930s and serving as a mediator between the communist and liberal wings of the antifascist movement in his country.

11After the German invasion of the Netherlands, Pos was arrested. He was detained in Buchenwald for a year, then in Dutch prisons until the autumn of 1943, when he was released for health reasons. At the end of the war, he resumed his university duties and became a member of the Commission for the Reorganization of Higher Education, charged with the denazification of Dutch universities. He also resumed his many organizational activities, presiding over the International Congress of Philosophy in Amsterdam (1948) as well as the newly founded International Federation of Philosophical Societies. To these academic responsibilities he added political engagement in the context of the Cold War: he took part in the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wrocław in 1948 and joined the European Society of Culture alongside Croce, Jaspers, Thomas Mann, and Sartre. In general, his experience of the Second World War seems to have radicalized him politically: he was now clearly sympathetic to communist ideas. His deep attachment to the principles of liberalism, however, prevented him from joining the Dutch Communist Party or identifying with Soviet policy—a nuanced ideological position that earned him misunderstanding on all sides and growing social and intellectual isolation.

12In this postwar period, which was very frustrating for him, Pos was often ill, and his vision of humanity grew darker, as evidenced for example by his articles “De filosofie der wetenschappen en de crisis der beschaving” (The Philosophy of the Sciences and the Crisis of Civilization) and “Het dal der na-oorlogse filosofie” (The Hollow of Postwar Philosophy). He turned ever more decisively away from German idealism and Husserlian phenomenology (which he criticized for its transcendental turn), orienting his thought toward a frankly relativist, anthropological, and historicizing perspective (though one still deeply distrustful of Heideggerian existentialism, which Pos denounced as an irrational philosophy). Pos re-situated his conceptions of language, metaphysics, and knowledge within a horizon at once more concrete (at times even biological) and more relative—the horizon of “lived experience.” In this spirit he published important articles such as “Valeur et limites de la phénoménologie,” “Betekenis als taalkundig en als wijsgerig fenomeen” (Meaning as a Linguistic and Philosophical Phenomenon), and “Le langage et le vécu” (Language and Lived Experience). Without in any way abandoning his long-standing themes, he became increasingly interested in ethical, political, social, and even religious questions: he thus reflected on intersubjectivity, history, and the spiritual becoming of humanity and society in texts such as “Geschiedenis als geestelijke werkelijkheid” (History as Spiritual Reality) and “De eenwording der mensheid” (The Unification of Humanity).

13Despite the doubts and disappointments he had to face during this period, Pos never abandoned his profoundly universalist, humanist, and optimistic vision of humanity, culture, and language. As Kuypers noted in his attempt to synthesize Pos’s thematically disparate and often contradictory work, if there is indeed a constant in his thought, it is his attachment to a certain form of rationalism—his faith in the multiple yet ever-present role of Reason at the very heart of all experience.9 Hendrik Pos died on September 25, 1955, in Haarlem, at the age of 57. Like many thinkers of the interwar period, he quickly fell into oblivion.

14The biobibliographical sketch just outlined provides a first mapping of Pos’s thought and its evolution: beginning from an epistemological reflection on linguistics clearly inspired by Rickert’s transcendental idealism, Pos soon reoriented his research toward the more descriptive perspective of Husserl’s phenomenology, concerned with “the things themselves,” before broadening his field of investigation to an analysis of scientific and philosophical knowledge in general and eventually rejecting phenomenology in favor of other models (Marx, Bergson), which he considered better suited to account for the lived, historically, culturally, and socially situated dimensions of both knowledge and empirical experience. In his preferred field of study, language, Pos seems to have followed a similar path—from a strictly “logical” approach to language conceived as an ideal object of knowledge graspable only through theoretical reflection, to a phenomenological study of the properties of concrete linguistic data and their relation to pre-theoretical consciousness, ultimately arriving at a relativist and historicizing concept of speech as one expressive form among others within the relative, dynamic, and meaningful horizon of human lived experience.

15Such an image, though it has its merits, presents two regrettable shortcomings. First, it links Pos’s thought too narrowly and uncritically to a limited number of supposedly successive “models” (Rickert, Husserl, Bergson, and Marx), thereby depriving it of the coherence and originality of its own problematic and neglecting the role of many other equally decisive sources of inspiration (the Prague school of phonology, Bühler, Cassirer, Marty, Vossler, Wundt, as well as Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Comte). Although the voices of his linguistic and philosophical masters are clearly audible and easily discernible in his work, Pos nevertheless never fully submitted to their logic, conforming to it only insofar as it served the elaboration of his own arguments.

16The idiosyncratic and selective way Pos handled his sources—an attitude for which he was sometimes criticized, especially regarding Husserlian phenomenology10—largely explains the coexistence of competing, even antagonistic influences in his work. It also highlights a second flaw in the above-mentioned interpretation of his thought—namely, the exaggerated simplification of a supposed linear progression from Pos’s initial transcendental and idealist position to his later empirical, relativist, and historicizing approach. Pos, in fact, did not adhere successively to different paradigms (neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, philosophy of life, Marxism) but continually set them against one another. In this sense, it is more accurate to conceive the dynamic of his thought not as a transition from a clearly logicist and idealist position to an equally clear historical and empiricist one, but as a constant oscillation between these two poles.

17Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of Pos’s work is precisely his concern to thematize in ever new ways the elusive relationship between the objective and abstract ideality of scientific or a priori knowledge and the lived reality of concrete subjective experience, without ever subsuming or reducing one to the other. It is therefore probably not wrong to see in the waltz of diverse sources—alternately more idealist or more empiricist—on which Pos drew, not the trace of hesitation or theoretical unease, but rather the result of his conscious and fully assumed will to turn constantly and critically toward new inspirations, in order to deepen—through a continual process of self-correction—his interpretation of a problem he always regarded as unresolved.

18The “dialectical” tension that animates and defines Pos’s work is manifested not only in successive oscillations between more idealist and more empiricist writings; it also lies at the very heart of the works that most clearly appear to belong to one paradigm or the other. Thus, The Logic of Linguistics, a work programmatically situated within the perspective of Rickertian transcendentalism, contains elements foreign to neo-Kantianism. As Klaas Willems quite rightly notes, when Pos declares that “even if the most abstract possible exposition of a universal system of categories encompassing the entire field of the thinkable were to succeed, a return by specification to the stratum of original data would remain inevitable in one way or another,” he superimposes, in fact, a principle of descriptive evidence of phenomenological origin upon the typically neo-Kantian methodological observation he actually wishes to apply, and which he formulates only a few lines below in these terms: “every science works with fundamental methods and concepts that depend on the properties of its material and that can only be discovered through a critical analysis of that same material.”11

19Conversely, in “Phénoménologie et linguistique,” where Pos most explicitly praises Husserl and advocates the methodological and epistemological usefulness of the latter’s concepts for linguistics and the philosophy of language, one discovers clear neo-Kantian remnants that lend a fundamentally paradoxical character to the central thesis of that article. According to Willems’s very perceptive analysis, Pos there attempts to define the role of the original, pretheoretical linguistic consciousness for scientific reflection on language. In this perspective, Pos believes he finds in Husserlian phenomenology the best method for explaining the fundamental continuity that, in his view, exists between original linguistic consciousness and a scientific or reflective knowledge of language—that is, between the concrete act of speech and its conceptual form in the theoretical analysis of the linguist. Yet in doing so, Pos continues to rely on a Rickertian principle which dictates, on the one hand, that the object of experience always undergoes an essential transformation in theoretical reflection and, on the other, implies a radical separation between the spheres of original experience and of theoretical reflective knowledge. Pos thus arrives at the conclusion that, in Willems’s words, “the activities of the naïve speaker and the reflection of the linguist are completely opposed to one another,” even though he remains convinced that “the methodical clarification of the lived experience of prescientific consciousness will always be the starting point of the science of language.”12

20We would not do Pos an injustice in saying that such paradoxes are symptomatic of his thought at every stage of its development and that he never truly succeeded in resolving them. Far from being a weakness, however, these paradoxes in fact perfectly reflect Pos’s determination to confront, without compromise or simplifying methodological dichotomies, the very difficult question of the relationship between ideal knowledge and concrete experience, between transcendental or conceptual structures and their empirical realizations. Despite certain aporias or contradictions that can rightly be criticized, it is nevertheless undeniable that Pos made positive contributions to this question. By the simple fact of insisting on the existence and fundamental role of an original, pretheoretical linguistic consciousness, he introduced a very important theme into linguistic and philosophical debates on language.13 This insistence also led Pos to address problems such as the expression of thought through language, the constitution of meaning and signification, the origin of language, and even the arbitrariness of the sign, all within an original perspective that seeks to take into account both the objective and theoretically idealizable aspects of phenomena and their original anchoring in concrete subjective lived experience.

21We must acknowledge that, most of the time, Pos falls back on a dualistic solution to account for this double ideal and lived dimension of phenomena. In “Meaning as a Linguistic and Philosophical Phenomenon,” typically, we see him invoke the necessity of studying language from two distinct perspectives: one objective or “scientific,” focused on the observable and idealizable phenomena from the outside; the other subjective or “phenomenological,” providing an introspective description of the lived experience of those same phenomena.14 This methodological duality can also be found in the complementary roles that Pos attributes to phonology and phonetics,15 in his “structural” and “genetic” analyses of language,16 or even in his peculiar way of opposing grammar and syntax.17 In all these cases, the objective and subjective perspectives are, according to Pos, both indispensable, and only their combination can produce truly adequate knowledge. The recurring problem undermining this radically dualistic position, of course, is that the determination of the properties of the same phenomenon from each of the two perspectives is sometimes clearly contradictory. To take but one example: how can one reconcile the fact that, for an external and objective observer, the sign possesses a clearly arbitrary value, with the phenomenologically justified feeling of a naïve speaker who believes there exists a natural and essential link between words and things?

22The most frequent reaction of Pos to such paradoxes is to invoke the historical, cultural, and intersubjective nature of consciousness: the differences that arise between scientific knowledge and lived experience are, according to him, essentially linked to the fact that subjective consciousness unfolds only gradually—it develops toward objective knowledge through a historical process and within a concrete sociocultural horizon that temporarily limits its capacities. According to Pos, “[subjectivity] constitutes in a sense the access to all knowledge, but the shadow of its own limitation accompanies it everywhere.”18 The double nature (both essential and arbitrary) of the sign is thus explained by Pos first through the initial limitation of the concrete horizon of individual subjectivity (which leads to a naïve and objectively untenable absolutization of the relation between word and object), and then through the progressive extension of this horizon as subjective consciousness, grasping itself with increasing objectivity and reflective distance, recognizes the contingent relativity of its own relations to reality and thus, at the same time, the arbitrary character of the links between words and things that it itself helps to establish.19

23A wholly different response to the paradoxical duality of objective knowledge and subjective experience emerges in Pos’s work through his encounter with structural linguistics and the phonology of the Prague Linguistic Circle. In “Quelques perspectives philosophiques de la phonologie” and “Perspectives du structuralisme,” Pos observes that, as defined by Prague phonology, the phoneme provides an example of something concrete, or concretely given, in which the dimension of objective ideality (or, more precisely, of generality and meaning) and that of lived experience almost coincide without distance: “The phoneme is a sound, chosen among others to be a meaning. This meaning is not delimited as is the case with words and sentences: it is felt. The connection between the sound element and the functional one is so intimate here that it is almost impossible to separate one from the other in thought.”20 The phoneme, in other words, appears as the concrete and particular realization—subjectively and originally lived by the hearer—of an ideal, general, and objective signification. Instead of the usual duality between objective and subjective moments, between object of knowledge and object of experience, Pos thus tends here toward a conception that attributes a certain intelligibility or generality to the concrete itself and therefore also implies a certain interweaving of the concrete, original experience of phenomena with their objective and reflective idealization.

24In truth, Pos did not explore very deeply the potential and implications of the idea of an intelligible meaning of the concrete revealed by the phoneme. It must be admitted that his thought generally remains much more marked by a dualistic tension between ideal knowledge and concrete experience, between theory and lived experience, or again between the abstract general and the concrete particular, than by any will to synthesize these dichotomous poles. In his otherwise very positive commentary on “Phénoménologie et linguistique,” Merleau-Ponty reproaches Pos for doing no more than “juxtaposing” the poles of original experience and theoretical reflection, without truly exploring or thematizing their interrelations.21 Nonetheless, one can find in “Phonologie et sémantique” and also in “La signification comme phénomène linguistique et philosophique” very clear suggestions of such interrelations. In “La problématique de la philosophie du langage,” Pos himself notes, in critical reaction to his own transcendental position in The Logic of Linguistics, that too great or too sharp an opposition between the abstract and real moments of phenomena “does not correspond to what linguistic consciousness actually observes, and the distance between theory and reality leads in this form to a total alienation between the two.”22

25In any case, it is important to emphasize that it is precisely Pos’s attempts—if not to reconcile, then at least to contain—the ideal objectivity of knowledge and the concrete subjectivity of lived experience that resonate most interestingly with the research being conducted at the same time by Gestalt psychology, Cassirer, Bühler, or the Russian phenomenologist Gustav Špet. These are also the aspects that most attracted the attention of figures such as Merleau-Ponty and Eugenio Coseriu.23 Merleau-Ponty—who in Phenomenology of Perception seeks to reconcile idealism and empiricism—appears particularly close to Pos, whether by the choice of his themes, the dialectical nature of his argumentative method, or his very nuanced ideological positioning.

26In connection with these last remarks, and to conclude this still very preliminary and schematic introduction to the main ideas and themes of Pos’s work, the question arises of its contemporary relevance. What has been said so far, it seems to me, highlights its undeniable interest in at least three complementary directions:

27First, Pos emerges as a highly significant historical figure in the epistemology of linguistics. Indeed, he was among the first to propose an explicitly philosophical reflection on linguistics and its methods. The limited impact of his ideas has certainly relegated Pos to a secondary role, but the neglect of his work up to now seems largely explained by the difficult access to many of his texts (published only in Dutch) and the very limited attention given to the interdisciplinary field of the philosophy of linguistics.24 The critical links that Pos maintained both with structural linguistics and with the philosophical and psychological context that presided over its emergence make his work a valuable snapshot of the epistemological and methodological debates in the language sciences at a pivotal moment in their history. In this sense, Pos’s work offers a particularly interesting perspective on the affinities between neo-Kantianism (Rickertian or Cassirerian) and structural linguistics. Moreover, it seems that the interest and originality of some of the arguments and ideas advanced by Pos still require serious comparative evaluation—particularly in relation to Saussure, Chomsky, or cognitive linguistics.25 His reflections on the status of the transcendental a priori or on the inherent meaning of lived experience seem to offer particularly valuable perspectives on the problem of the relations between perception and concept, which, according to Lia Formigari, has been neither resolved nor even seriously debated by generativist and cognitivist linguistics.26

28Second, Pos holds obvious importance for any study of the genealogy of structuralism, understood both as a specifically linguistic theory and in its broader sense as a general philosophical paradigm. The very positive reception by Jakobson and Merleau-Ponty of Pos’s reflections on the phoneme, opposition, and original linguistic consciousness suggests synergies between phenomenology and structuralism whose existence has long been suspected but whose full scope and implications have yet to be fully measured.27 This impression is reinforced when one considers the striking similarities between Pos and Špet, whether in their rejection of granting knowledge a purely ideal and subjective source or in their essentially “collectivist” definitions of consciousness. It seems at least undeniable that no reevaluation of the evolution of the structuralist paradigm during the 1920s and 1930s can be truly complete without giving much fuller consideration to the ideas, activity, and mediating role of Pos.

29Third, through his attitude both favorable and critical toward Marxist ideas, Pos’s work constitutes one of the rare platforms where these ideas could be confronted with idealist and phenomenological perspectives in a manner relatively free from the ideological struggles of the postwar period. Here again lies the opportunity to observe and examine, in a concrete historical context, the encounter and interaction of theoretical discourses that were often antagonistic. The Marxist hue of Pos’s thought is made particularly interesting by the mediating role he played for theories (here one thinks especially of Prague phonology) that developed primarily in Russia and Central Europe and whose evolution in their countries of origin, as well as their later reception in the West, were strongly marked by their confrontations with Marxism.

Notes

• 1 Kuypers, Aler, “Woord vooraf,” in: Pos (1957), p. 9 [my translation].
• 2 Cf. Derkx (1994), who refers to numerous interviews conducted with Pos’s students or colleagues, pp. 487–488.
• 3 Cf. Salverda (1991), p. 222.
• 4 Jan Romein (1893–1962), Dutch historian and journalist, is best known for having initiated the publication of Anne Frank’s Diary.
• 5 In reaction to his suspension, ordered for having defended a non-literal interpretation of the Bible, Geelkerken founded a dissident branch of the Reformed Church of the Netherlands, thereby provoking a significant schism.
• 6 Jakobson (1973a), p. 14.
• 7 He corresponded at the time with many of them: Bally, Brøndal, Havránek, Hjelmslev, Jakobson, Sechehaye, Trubetzkoy, and his Dutch compatriots.
• 8 Jakobson (1973b), p. 138.
• 9 Cf. Kuypers (1958), p. 59; see also Willems (1994), p. 244.
• 10 Cf. Orth (1967); Aschenberg (1978), who reproach Pos for his rough-and-ready interpretation of Husserl.
• 11 Cf. Willems (1994), pp. 218–219, and Pos, below, p. 33.
• 12 Willems, op. cit., p. 227.
• 13 Cf. Willems, p. 222.
• 14 Cf. below, pp. 239 ff.
• 15 Cf. below, “Phonology and Semantics.”
• 16 Cf. below, “Problems of Origin.”
• 17 Cf. Daalder, “Filologie, grammatica, syntaxis bij H.J. Pos,” in: Daalder (1990), pp. 101–122.
• 18 Pos (1957), p. 29 [my translation].
• 19 Cf. below, “Pretheoretical Linguistic Consciousness.”
• 20 Cf. below, p. 117.
• 21 Merleau-Ponty (1960), pp. 106 ff.
• 22 Cf. below, p. 65.
• 23 Cf. Merleau-Ponty (1960), pp. 106 ff., 131 ff.; Coseriu (1958) and (1962); Coquet (2007), pp. 18–22.
• 24 Šor (1927), p. 65, also notes that the very unfavorable review written by Meillet of The Logic of Linguistics in the Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris (1922) contributed to the unfortunate discrediting of this work and its author among linguists.
• 25 Cf. Daalder (1990) and Salverda (1991).
• 26 Cf. Formigari (2006).
• 27 In his well-known analyses of the influence of phenomenology on Jakobson, Elmar Holenstein (1975, 1976) mentions Pos only briefly and focuses too exclusively on Husserl; cf. Flack (2011). On this question, see also Puech (1985), pp. 28–29.