The International Alfred Schutz Circle for Phenomenology and Interpretive Social Science

Alfred Schutz (1899-1959), an astute commentator on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, brought that philosophical method to bear on the social sciences, for which Schutz provided a philosophical foundation in his analysis of the social world of everyday life.  Attentive to the meaning of the action to the actor, in the tradition of Max’s Weber’s Verstehende Sociology, Schutz developed his own scientific type-analyses of the stranger and the homecomer, but he also extended his philosophical analyses to the spheres of music, art, literature, and opera; to contemporary issues, such as racial discrimination; and to a discussion of the works of prominent phenomenologists and to philosophers and social scientists of other traditions.