Robert Denoon Cumming, an American interpreter and historian of 20th Century European thought, phenomenology in particular, has died in New York. He was 87.
His death Aug. 25 was announced by Columbia University. He taught there for 37 years and retired in 1985 as Frederick J.E. Woodbridge professor emeritus of philosophy.
Mr. Cumming’s major work was a study of the phenomenological movement, in print from the University of Chicago Press.
Its four volumes are “Phenomenology and Deconstruction: The Dream Is Over” (1991); “Method and Imagination” (1992); “Breakdown in Communication” (2002); and “Solitude” (2001). The books discuss the work of Husserl, Sartre, Heidegger and others.
A naturalized American, Mr. Cumming was born in Nova Scotia and traveled in Europe and Palestine before graduating from Harvard in 1938.
A Rhodes scholar at Oxford, he stayed in Europe to serve in combat intelligence. He was part of a liaison team with the Free French Army and took part in the liberation of Paris. He earned the French Croix de Guerre for bravery and the Legion of Merit.
Mr. Cumming studied at the Sorbonne after the war and received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1950. He was appointed an instructor at Columbia in 1948. He was the philosophy department chairman from 1961-64.
A translator of Plato, he contributed articles to philosophical journals and was an editor of two of them. His own “Starting Point: An Introduction to the Dialectic of Existence” (University of Chicago Press, 1996) remains in print.
Mr. Cumming is survived by his wife, Jeanne Hannan Cumming; a daughter, Ann Cumming of Santa Barbara, Calif.; a sister, Isabel Seimer of Brunswick, Maine; and a grandson.
