Critique & Humanism | 1 | 1990 | Phenomenology as a Dialogue

La sociologie comme connaissance de la socialité

Michel Maffesoli

Zum Begriff des ‘Finiten’ in den ‘Finite Provinces of Meaning’ von Alfred Schütz

Richard Grathoff

Wertbeziehung und Relevanz. Zu Schütz’ Weber-Rezeption

Ilja Srubar

Alfred Schutz and the Problem of Every Day Life Average Structures

Kolyo Koev

Do not Interpretations belong to God?

Liliana Deyanova

Dialogues in Limbo

Steven Vaitkas

Dialogues in Limbo is the name of a book by the philosopher George Santayana which includes two colloquies between Socrates and the Stranger on self-government (Santayana,1926). Alfred Schutz concludes one of his very few review articles ever written, namely on Santayana’s Domination and Powers, with the following citation from the former book concerning Socrates interpretation of the old oracle — Right government rests on the will of the governed: “There is no right government except good government; good government is what benefits the governed; the good of governed is determined not by their topmost wishes or their ruling passions but by their hidden nature and their real opportunities; and only knowledge discovering the hidden nature and these real opportunities, and speaking in their name, has a right to rule in the state or in the private conscience”. In the following it is not a treatise in political economy towards which we aim, but towards the much more fundamental problems concerned with that point of view which is not satisfied with the analysis of the taken for granted relative natural world view as first outlined by Scheler and Schutz, but rather aims towards a philosophical ontology or existentialism as a supposedly deeper answer to all such higher questions as raised in the above. Refusing to remain at the level of “Dialogues in Limbo”, they miss the concrete nature of persons and their real opportunities within the social group and notwithstanding all opposition are in this sense no different than Habermas who with his communicative theory attempts to found human inter-subjectivity and the life-world in communication. Alfred Schutz with his analyses of the relative natural world view would realize that communication can only be founded in inter-subjectivity itself and remaining at the level of the everyday life-world would openly admit our own “dialogues in limbo”.

Transcendentalism and Incommensurability of Scientific Traditions

Deyan Deyanov

The problem that interests me is: What is the effect of Kuhn‘s discovery of the incommensurability of scientific traditions on Husserl’s transcendentalism (generally) and on his transcendental logic (in particular)? Are the scientist of two incommensurable traditions deprived of intersubjectivity up to the point not to understand each other? Or their misunderstanding is not predetermined and there exist conditions under which a dialogue between them is possible? What would be the fate of the “truths in themselves” valid for “man, angel or god” if we not give up the idea of incommensurability? Would they be valid solely for the angels and gods of our tradition? Or there exist circumstances under which dialogical universal validity is possible, making the truths of the traditions incommensurable with ours to be valid as truths to us (although not as our truths)? If there are scientifi c revolutions and incommensurability, will not the continuity in science be lost? Could we fi nd incommensurability between logical traditions (for instance, between Aristotle’s and Russel’s logic, or between Hegel’s and Aristotle’s logic) too? To sum things up: Is the antinomy of the thesis of incommensurability and the antithesis of transcendentalism insoluble? To off er a solution to these problems I shall first dwell on the theory of prepredicative self-evidences.

The Dual Articulation of Social Forms and the New Sociology of Science

Karin Knorr Cetina

In recent years, we have witnessed a renewed interest in the „micro-macro question“, and we have seen a curious reapproachment of system-level perspectives with phenomenological and interpretative approaches. Theorists associated with functionalism, system theory or critical theory have found it worthwhile to deal in some detail with the more phenomenological, action-oriented and culturalist perspectives and have even borrowed some of their concepts and results . To be sure some discussions and uses of micro-level concepts seem more concerned with fending off the challenge provided by these perspectives rather than with genuinely confronting or incorporating their results. Nonetheless, there appears to be some realization that phenomenological, interactionist and culturalist perspectives have something to offer to theories of modern society. In this paper, I do not want to go over the various qualms system-level and conduct-level approaches have with each other. Rather, I want to approach the issue as one of building a generalized account of the empirical world. To begin with, I want to give a theoretical formulation to the bearing phenomenological, interactionist and culturalist perspectives have on such an account. I have in mind perspectives which go by the name of ethnomethodology, cognitive sociology, social phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, ethnogenics, ethnoscience, semiotic and symbolic anthropology, and the like. These perspectives are variously called “micro-sociological”, “hermeneutic”, “interpretative”, and the like. None of these labels quite fits, either because other theories are not appropriately excluded, or because the label is too restrictive in view of the many theoretical differences between these perspectives. Despite of these differences, one identifying characteristic of the approaches I have named surely is that they pay close attention to the empirical detail of ordinary social knowledge and conduct in everyday life.

For a Phenomenological Archeology of the Sociological Stuctures

Angela Ales Bello

My intentions are essentially of a methodological nature, for I propose to do no more than to suggest a few points that could be a contribution to a phenomenological approach in sociological research. To this end I should like to take my cue from a number of observations to be found in Grathoff s text “Metaphorik und Apriori lebensweltlicher Forschung: Intersubjektivität, Typik und Normalität“ about Husserl‘s position and its possible application to the analysis of social structures. First of all, it seems to me that his discussion of two fundamental aspects of phenomenological epoché is particularly interesting: the „Epoché hinsichtlich aller objektiven Wissenschaften“ and the „Epoché hinsichtlich der gesamten natürlich-normalen Lebenswelt“. While the former is accepted and fully shared, the latter – according to Grathoff – raises a number of serious diffi culties. Reduction with respect to all the objective sciences is undoubtedly the keystone of the phenomenological method, the one that makes it possible to confi gure phenomenology as a science sui generis, a noecartesian science, placing in brackets, as it were, all the scientific formations taken as a whole, that is to say, not just the physico-mathematical sciences, but also the so called human sciences.

‘The Home’ as an Ontological Problem

Kalin Yanakiev

Elementary Social Crisis. Genesis of the Anticipated Mediator

Andrei Raichev

Towards a Science of the Subjective Paradigm: Protosociology

Thomas Luckmann