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The power of phenomenology (2019) is the 10th book co-authored by Robert Stolorow and George Atwood. This reviewer, after reading their 10th book, looked for reviews of their first book, Faces in a cloud (1979), and found a prescient review in 1980 by Judith Hubback (1917–2006). Hubback believed that Stolorow and Atwood’s writing style was too verbose. She observed their strong inclination towards iconoclasm, calling Faces in a cloud “a very sober version of The emperor’s new clothes … the iconoclastic remarks of the ‘enfant terrible’” (Hubback, 1980, p. 296). She called attention to the authors’ desire to “purify theory completely of reifications” (p. 298; emphasis in the original). She found the last chapter both considerable and impressive. In conclusion, Hubback hypothesized that the usual advantage of co-authorship was that the authors would restrain each other’s conceits; she wondered whether the opposite might be true here.
These observations continue to hold in the case of The power of phenomenology, starting with the work’s impressiveness: certainly in the amount of intellectual work behind it and in the personal honesty the authors show towards anonymous readers. The writing remains verbose, but judging by Stolorow and Atwood’s publication record, it is not something their students find troublesome. For a flavor, in one of the sections attributed to Stolorow, he writes:
Analyzing the philosophical thinking in its individual subjective context seemed to be of assistance in clarifying the limits to generality of the philosophical ideas as foundational for a science of experience, and thus in pointing beyond the particular horizons of applicability. (p. 12)
In one of Atwood’s sections, he writes:
The reductive-atomistic view, enframing and explaining away language in terms of factors and processes operating independently of it, is actually itself a Wittgensteinian ‘picturing’ of language’s essence, and leads to a metaphysicalization from which there can be