The viennese connection: Alfred schutz and the Austrian school (original) (raw)
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A Brief Intellectual Biography of Alfred Schutz
SocietàMutamentoPolitica, 2015
was born in Vienna April 13, 1899. After graduation, he participated in the First World War as a cadet officer in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He fought on the Italian front on the Piave river, near Conegliano. After the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire, the young Schutz found himself before the crisis that hit Austrian society: he wanted to pursue his medical studies or follow an academic career, in addition to being a musician. All three possibilities seemed implausible, due to the lengthy insecurity he would likely encounter (Wagner 1983: 8). As a result, he chose to study law, following courses of international law at the University of Vienna and international trade at the Viennese Academy. Over the course of his university studies, Schutz came into contact with lawyers like Kelsen, economists like von Wieser, von Mises and Machlup, political scientists like Voegelin. Perhaps the key figure for the young Schutz was the mathematician and philosopher Felix Kaufmann, who not only directed him towards a more rigorous methodology, but above all, introduced him to phenomenology and Edmund Husserl. In the first semester of 1918, Max Weber gave a course at the University of Vienna that had a wide resonance. Schutz was unable to attend because he was still at the front, but he was in contact with students who were struck by that lesson. The influence of Weber had a fundamental impact on the thought of the Austrian sociologist, who studied his work in depth after he finished university. The Weberian theme of the subjectivity of the understanding of meaning constituted a bridge to fill the gap between the technicality of economic theory and the social world (Wagner 1983: 13). Schutz graduated in law in December, 1921, and began working as managing secretary of the Association of Austrian Bankers. In 1926 he married Ilse Heim, who gave birth to him two children, Evelyn in 1933, and Georg in 1938. In 1929, he began working as an expert in law and banking with Reitler & Co., a private bank that operated in Central and Eastern Europe. It was also for his intense interpersonal relationships due to his work, that Schutz de-brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
2011
The sociologist and philosopher Alfred Schutz is the major representative of a phenomenologically based sociology. Using Edmund Husser!'s phenomenology he established the epistemological foundations of Max Weber's sociology of understanding. He created the basis for a methodology of qualitative social science and most significantly developed a theory of the life-world. In establishing a specific conception of the life-world, Schutz was able to combine a theory of knowledge and relevance with a theory of social action. He also succeeded in developing a theory of the sign and symbol and a unique methodological perspective to serve as a basis for this entire paradigm.
Herbert Spiegelberg and Alfred Schutz: Some Affinities
Human Studies, 2004
What may at first sight strike any reader of Herbert Spiegelberg’s history of phenomenology, known to literally every student versed in the discipline, is a strange paradox: a solemn dedication at the first page of the book to “the memory of Alfred Schutz, one of the brightest hopes for an authentic phenomenology in the United States,” compared with a relatively small fragment of Spiegelberg’s book concerning Schutz’s phenomenology (Spiegelberg, 1994, pp. 255–256). Yet even in this fragment, which touches only slightly upon the kernel of Schutz’s sociophenomenological thinking, we find essential indications concerning the profound affinity of both thinkers, both engaged in a challenging endeavor of laying cornerstones of American phenomenology. The idea of this paper is to explore basic proposals of both thinkers and to shed light on their mutual relationship and their impact on phenomenology and theoretical sociology – an impact that can only become greater in the future. Spiegelberg notes that Schutz, by “securing the philosophic foundations of Max Weber’s sociology,” explores “the ‘multiple realities’ or ‘worlds’ in which we find ourselves embedded, from the world of our everyday life to the world of dreams, thus showing how social actors, with their various experiences, “play music together” (Spiegelberg, 1994, pp. 255–256). Thus, he sets the philosophical foundations of sociology on the solid ground of his specific understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology, an understanding that rejects “Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of intersubjectivity as inadequate” and chooses instead to focus on “mundane phenomenology” (Spiegelberg, 1994, p. 256), offering a more direct approach to intersubjectivity: a careful study of intersubjectively given and created phenomena, based on bracketing doubts and convictions concerning reality, and on a specific understanding of Husserl’s epoché. The latter question – interpretation of Husserl’s key notion of epoché – appears to be fundamental to both thinkers, and seems crucial for the impact of phenomenology on sociological theorizing, especially in Schutz. Spiegelberg – more philosophical in his approach – follows Alexander Pfänder in understanding phenomenological epoché – the basic methodological operation in phenomenology – as a means of preventing premature assertions of knowledge, and as a continuous effort of grasping things as they are and as they appear, which has principally nothing to do with any “reduction” of cognitive
Schoenberg's early Wagnerisms: Atonality and the redemption of Ahasuerus
Cambridge Opera Journal, 1994
When we young Austrian Jewish artists grew up, our self-esteem suffered very much from the pressure of certain circumstances. It was the time when Richard Wagner's work started its victorious career, and the success of his music and poems was followed by an infiltration of his Weltanschauung, of his philosophy. You were no true Wagnerian if you did not believe in his philosophy, in the ideas of Erlösung durch Liebe, salvation by love; you were not a true Wagnerian if you did not believe in Deutschtum, in Teutonism; and you could not be a true Wagnerian without being a follower of his anti-Semitic essay, Das Judentum in der Musik, ‘Judaism in Music’. … You have to understand the effect of such statements on young artists.
The Vienna Circle's reception of Nietzsche
Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, 2020
Friedrich Nietzsche was among the figures from the history of nineteenth century philosophy that, perhaps surprisingly, some of the Vienna Circle's members had presented as one of their predecessors. While, primarily for political reasons, most Anglophone figures in the history of analytic philosophy had taken a dim view of Nietzsche, the Vienna Circle's leader Moritz Schlick admired and praised Nietzsche, rejecting what he saw as a misinterpretation of Nietzsche as a militarist or proto-fascist. Schlick, Frank, Neurath, and Carnap were in different ways committed to the view that Nietzsche made a significant contribution to the overcoming of metaphysics. Some of these philosophers praised the intimate connection Nietzsche drew between his philosophical outlook and empirical studies in psychology and physiology. In his 1912 lectures on Nietzsche, Schlick maintained that Nietzsche overcame an initial Schopenhauerian metaphysical-artistic phase in his thinking, and subsequently remained a positivist until his last writings. Frank and Neurath made the weaker claim that Nietzsche contributed to the development of a positivistic or scientific conception of the world. Schlick and Frank took a further step in seeing the mature Nietzsche as an Enlightenment thinker.