Butler's work radical as it may seem responds to and engages the study of being), epistemology with of ontolo studying(the classic questions philosophy of language. After study of knowing) and the 1970s at Bennington College philosophy as an undergraduate in in Vermont and Yale University Butler travelled on a Fulbright Scholarship to Heidelberg University in Germany, attending the lec tures and seminars of philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and reading continental philosophy. Back Yale for graduate training, she occa- at sionally attended lectures by Jacques Derrida and Paul de theorists Man not without ambivalence, apparently Butler earned her PhD in philosophy under Maurice Natanson, an influential and well respected phenomenologist and Husserl scholar who had studied with Alfred Schutz.