From the very beginning, pater Van Breda gave researchers unhindered access to all the documents in the Archives. To this day, the Husserl-Archives in Leuven remain faithful to what Van Breda once called its “unrestrictive ‘open door policy’.”
In 1944 the Vietnamese philosopher Tran Duc Thao (1917-1993) of the École normale supérieure, visited the Husserl-Archives. His research, focusing on Husserl’s development of the phenomenological method and the connected concept of lifeworld, later resulted in the first part of a work titled ‘Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique’ (1951). Van Breda gave copies of transcriptions to Tran Duc Thao as well as Paul Ricoeur, who first visited Leuven in January 1947.
