About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

2 J. Value Inquiry 1 (1968)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi2 and id is 1 raw text is: 1 PHENOMENOLOGY AS A GENERAL THEORY OF SOCIAL ACTION * ROBERT W. FRIEDRICHS The renewed interest in Husserl evident within contemporary philosophy and the recent translation and publication of Alfred Schutz' Collected Works 1 together with the vivid and sociologically sophisticated efforts of such younger social theorists as Peter Berger, Thomas Luckman, and Ed- ward Tiryakian 2 signal an important new turn for general theory in sociology and one that promises to raise the discipline's contextual awareness considerably. Husserl, trained in mathematics, physics, and philosophy, set out to con- front both the inter- and intrasubjective phenomena of consciousness im- mediately and directly by the systematic, ordered rhetoric of cognition. His goal was none less than a completely reliable science of the subjective. Aware that natural science was burdened by a set of largely unrecognized assumptions, he claimed that through a technique of self-conscious phe- nomenological reduction - the apperception of the impact of phenomena upon one's consciousness devoid of reference to the actual presence or ab- sence of external objects - he had framed an epistemology freed of presup- positions. The phenomena abstracted were in turn seen to structure them- selves within a format of universally present and relatively invariant Ideen and found to relate themselves, in the life histories of individuals in society, to an inverse suspension of doubt in the reality of everyday life on the latter's part. Needless to say, the self-evident nature of the posture was questioned by many - with perhaps Husserl's most promising student, Mar- tin Heidegger, breaking away to become philosophy's leading exponent of existentialism and succeeding to his chair at Freibourg. Rather than claim * Presented at The Second Conference on Value Inquiry at The University of Akron, April 19-20, 1968. 1 Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natan- son (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague, 1965); Collected Papers III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. I. Schutz (The Hague, 1966). Also see Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Northwestern University Press, 1967). 2 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Double- day, 1966); Edward Tiryakian, Existential Phenomenology and the Sociological Tra- dition, American Sociological Review, XXX (October 1965), 674-688; Communication between Berger and Tiryakian, American Sociological Review, XXXII (April 1966), 259- 264; also see Tiryakian, Sociologism and Existentialism (Prentice-Hall, 1962); Berger and Stanley Pullberg, Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness, History and Theory, IV, 2 (1965), 196-211; and Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Transfor- mation of Symbols in Industrial Society (Macmillan, 1967).

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most