Thomas Dorion Cairns was born on July 4, 1901. His father was a Methodist pastor. Cairns studied phenomenological theory of value with Winthrop Bell at Harvard in 1923 and 1924, used a traveling fellowship to study with Edmund Husserl for two years, returned later for over another year, and received his doctorate with The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl in 1933. After temporary positions in New York, Cairns taught psychology as well as philosophy at Rockford College from 1938 to 1950. During World War II, he won a Bronze Star as a prisoner of war interrogator in the Air Corps. He was invited to the New School for Social Research in 1954 by Alfred Schutz, taught there with Aron Gurwitsch during the 1960s, retired in 1969, and died on January 4, 1973. All who heard him considered him a brilliant teacher, but he published little. However, his translations of Husserl's Cartesian Meditations (1960) and Formal and Transcendental...