Abstract
Aron Gurwitsch's critique of Schutz's essay “The Stranger” is the starting point for this consideration of Schutz's relationship with phenomenology. This relationship is based on Schutz's emphasis on the value of the “average” as a phenomenological structure. In opposing sociology to philosophy, Gurwitsch takes this value as inferior in comparison with what he sees as cardinal issues of transcendental phenomenology. What Gurwitsch finds incompatible with phenomenological inquiry – the idea and practice of the natural attitude within the social sphere – Schutz turns into the core of his philosophy. “The phenomenology of the natural attitude” is as essentially philosophical as any reflectively practiced human science. The problem of how everydayness is constituted requires a phenomenological insight that leads the explorer – through reconstructing the meaning in terms of the mundane – straight to the origin.
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References
Gurwitsch, A. and Schutz, A. (1989). Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939-1959. (edited by Richard Grathoff, trans. by J. Claude Evans, with a forward by Maurice Natanson), Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Schutz, A. (1962). Collected Papers, Vol. 1: The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Schutz, A. (1964). Collected Papers, Vol. II: Studies in Social Theory. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Thomas, W. and Thomas, D. (1928). The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs. New York: Knopf.
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Natanson, M. Alfred Schutz: Philosopher and Social Scientist. Human Studies 21, 1–12 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005381432621
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005381432621