Schutz and Gurwitsch on Agency

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Barber
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Alfred Schutz ◽  
Objective Time ◽  
Alfred Schütz ◽  
Aron Gurwitsch

Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz differ over the paramount reality, with Schutz stressing the importance of meaningful action in everyday life and Gurwitsch the perception of objects in objective time. On the ego, Schutz and Husserl rightly argue for its epistemological accessibility, while Gurwitsch defends a non-egological consciousness that seems counterpoised to the self-appropriating, agential ego of Husserl and Schutz. However, Gurwitsch’s endorsement of Sartre’s non-egological consciousness might have facilitated a rapprochement with the agency to be found in Schutz’s and Husserl’s egological accounts. John Drummond’s criticisms of Gurwitsch’s phenomenalist account of the object suggest an object less appropriate for interaction with the bodily agency that Schutz highlights. Gurwitsch pays less attention to agency insofar as he extends his noematic focus to the ultimate ontological suppositions of various orders of being. The differences between Schutz and Gurwitsch on agency result from their diverging overarching strategies within a common phenomenological framework.

scholarly journals An Approach to the Analysis of Religious Reality in the Social Phenomenology of Alfred Schütz

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-327
Author(s):  
Alexey Sitnikov
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Alfred Schutz ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Multiple Realities ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Alfred Schütz ◽  
Social Phenomenology

The article deals with the social phenomenology of Alfred Schütz. Proceeding from the concept of multiple realities, the author describes religious reality, analyses its relationship with everyday, theoretical, and mythological realities, and identifies the areas where they overlap and their specifics. According to Schütz’s concept, reality is understood as something that has a meaning for a human being, and is also consistent and certain for those who are ‘inside’ of it. Realities are structurally similar to one another as they are similar to the reality that is most obvious for all human beings, i.e., the world of everyday life. Religious reality has one of the main signs of genuine reality, that of internal consistency. Religious reality has its own epoché (special ascetic practices) which has similarities with the epoché of the theoretical sphere since neither serve practical objectives, and imply freedom from the transitory issues of everyday life. Just as the theoretical sphere exists independently of the life of a scientist in the physical world and is needed to transfer results to other people, so the religious reality depends on ritual actions and material objects in its striving for the transcendent. Individual, and especially collective, religious practices are performed physically and are inextricably linked with the bodily ritual. The article notes that although Schütz’s phenomenological concept of multiple realities has repeatedly served as a starting point for the development of various social theories, its heuristic potential has not been exhausted. This allows for the further analyzing and development of topical issues such as national identity and its ties with religious tradition in the modern era, when religious reality loses credibility and has many competitors, one of which is the modern myth of the nation. Intersubjective ideas of the nation that are socially confirmed as the self-evident reality of everyday life cause complex emotions and fill human lives, thus displacing religious reality or forcing the latter to come into complex interactions with the national narrative.

Distending Straight‐Masculine Time: A Phenomenology of the Disabled Speaking Body

Hypatia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua St. Pierre
Keyword(s):  
Alfred Schutz ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Objective Time ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Alfred Schütz ◽  
Communicative Space

Drawing upon feminist, queer, and crip phenomenology, this essay argues that the distinct temporality of the lived, stuttering body disturbs the normalized “choreography” of communication and thereby threatens the disabled speaker's recognition as a speaking subject. Examined through the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and Alfred Schutz, the disabled speaking body is temporally “out of step” with the normalized bodily rhythms and pace of communicative practices in relation to both lived and objective time. Disciplined for his incalculable and therefore irrational bodily choreography, the disabled speaker is foregrounded against an objective, instrumentally ordered world constituted by a disembodied and hegemonic “straight‐masculine” time. Although dominant communicative choreographies may often be unlivable for disabled speakers, cripping communicative time rejects the cardinal value of futurity and invites interlocutors to gather in a noninstrumentalized and nonproductive present. This reshaping of communicative space enacts new modes of relationality and opens up an array of communicative futures suppressed or cut off by straight‐masculine time.

scholarly journals ”Så griner vi heldigvis lidt af det”. Ægtepars erfaringer med demens i et hverdagslivs sociologisk perspektiv

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tania Dræbel ◽  
Kirsten Teglgaard Lund ◽  
Anne Liveng
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Married Couples ◽  
Social World ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Alfred Schutz ◽  
Dementia Diagnosis ◽  
Care Relationship ◽  
Alfred Schütz

“Fortunately, we laugh a bit about it”. Couples experiences with dementia in an everyday life sociological perspectiveThe article examines changes in the relation between spouses in married couples, where one partner has a dementia diagnosis. Seven qualitative interviews with couples are analyzed with Alfred Schutz sociology of everyday life as a theoretical framework. The analysis asks the question how spouses reinvent routines in an everyday life characterized by a growing unpredictability, and thereby creates new meaningfulness and roles. The analysis illustrates how partners orient themselves in a changed social world, and thereby manage to live an everyday life with dementia. Three modes of relation to each other and to the illness are found, which could partly be understood in connection to the seriousness of the illness: first the couple manage challenges in a marital alliance, later an agreement with new roles and tasks for the partners is established, and towards the final stages of dementia marriage is described as an asymmetrical care relationship.

On Anonymity and Appresentation

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 45-67
Author(s):  
Max Gropper ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Group ◽  
The Other ◽  
One Dimension ◽  
Alfred Schutz ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
The Third ◽  
Alfred Schütz ◽  
The Stranger

In his famous work on the stranger, Alfred Schutz focuses on the interpretative discrepancies between in-groups and out-groups from the per­spective of a stranger approaching a new group. In doing so, Schutz emphasizes that strangers can overcome their strangeness within a social group by adapting to the prevalent cultural patterns. Shifting the perspective from the stranger to the in-group this essay aims to argue that the experience of the Other’s strangeness due to a discrepancy of interpretative schemes is only one dimension of how the stranger is perceived in everyday life. A second dimension can be derived from Schutz’ work on appresentation. This essay will follow four analytical steps. First, this essay summarizes the Schutzian approach on perceiving the Other as a taken-for-granted part of everyday life within an assumed intersubjective understanding based on an assumed reciprocity of perspectives. Referring to Eberle’s description of an irreciprocity of perspectives, the second section analyzes the Schutzian stranger based on an intersubjective understanding. The third section then focuses on the appresentational pro­cesses of perceiving the stranger in everyday life. By using Goffman’s distinction between virtual and actual social identity, the interplay of categorizing and experiencing the Other in everyday life can be described. Finally, considering the question of how it comes that people can find themselves strangers in their own society, this paper closes by merging the argumentation with a description of the Schutzian perspective on the processes of stigmatization.

Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939-1959.

1990 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 914
Author(s):  
Kurt H. Wolff ◽  
Richard Grathoff ◽  
J. Claude Evans
Keyword(s):  
Alfred Schutz ◽  
Alfred Schütz ◽  
Aron Gurwitsch

scholarly journals УЛОГА ФЕНОМЕНОЛОШКОГ СТАВА У ПРОБЛЕМУ ДРУШТВЕНЕ СТВАРНОСТИ АЛФРЕДА ШИЦА

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (27) ◽  
pp. 47-73
Author(s):  
Душан Миленковић
Keyword(s):  
Special Reference ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Scientific Theory ◽  
Alfred Schutz ◽  
Natural Attitude ◽  
Multiple Realities ◽  
The World ◽  
Alfred Schütz

In this paper, the thought of the Austrian-born theorist Alfred Schutz, presented in the articles published in the first volume of his collected papers, is examined from the perspective of the role that Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological attitude plays in it. Advocating the importance of analyzing the structure of the world of everyday life in his phenomenology of the natural attitude, Schutz uses various aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology, without paying special attention to the phenomenological attitude itself. Therefore, the paper discusses the extent to which Schitz’s understanding of the natural attitude and its world depends on this concept of Husserl’s philosophy, with special reference to Shutz’s theory in his article “On Multiple Realities”. After showing that Husserl’s phenomenological attitude cannot be compared to the “attitude of scientific theory” discussed in the article on multiple realities, the paper additionally analyzes the absence of the phenomenological attitude in Schutz’s thought while turning to Maurice Natanson’s critique of Schutz’s theory.

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