Abstract
Thomas Seebohm does not recognize sufficiently that Alfred Schutz would have been open to the contributions the natural sciences could make to the cultural sciences and to the use of predictive methodologies in the cultural sciences. Further, in contrast to Seebohm, Schutz takes into account the minimal ontological differences underpinning the natural science/cultural science divide. As far as disinterested observers are concerned, Schutz was clear about the differences between past and present and the need for correlative epistemological adjustments. In addition, Schutz shows the importance of the relevances of the cultural scientist, such as the positive interest in discovering the historical meaning of past actors, for achieving social scientific objectivity, and he is attuned to the importance of the community of scientists for determining objectivity. Consequently, his concern for cultural scientific objectivity is less ascetical in character than Seebohm’s. Further differences between Schutz and Seebohm appear in their understanding of because motives, the relationship between the natural attitude and the life-world, and the use of eidetic methodology outside of the parameters of the phenomenological reduction.
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Notes
- 1.
Seebohm repeatedly defines history as an effort to determine “what really happened.”
- 2.
As I read Husserl in his Crisis, he speaks of a second epoché beyond the first epoché in which the transcendental ego constitutes the world, and in the second epoché, the absolute ego is the one that is “the ultimate unique center of function in all constitution” and so constitutes even the transcendental ego. See Husserl (1970, 186).
- 3.
That Schutz conceived his own discussions in Chapter 2 of The Phenomenology of the Social World were conducted under the constraints of phenomenological reduction, see Alfred Schutz (2004, 129–130).
- 4.
Schutz explains how relevances are crucial for disinterestedness here.
- 5.
It is important to note that Schutz, on p. 148, mentions that verification happens in the cultural sciences in the same way that it does in the natural sciences, as long as we realize that empirical observation is not merely sensual perception of occurrences of the outer world. Verification in the natural sciences occurs when the community of scientists finds a hypothesis valid. See Embree (2015, 169). Embree, in personal comments, stated that Seebohm was a falsificationist after the fashion of Karl Popper, whereas Seebohm thought that Schutz was a verificationist. Given that Schutz in “Tiresias, or Our Knowledge of Future Events” (1964, 286), interpreted Husserl’s idealization of “and so forth and so on” as implying the assumption “valid until counter-evidence appears,” one might be able to build an argument on the basis of his understanding of everyday life typifications, that Schutz was actually a falsificationist in the sciences also. We will abide by the use of “verificationist” in the text of this paper to indicate that one’s research must pass the test of the community of scientists. “Passing the test,” though, could simply mean that no sufficient counter-evidence has been advanced.
- 6.
The text cites a letter to Schutz from Husserl dated May 3, 1932, and praising Schutz’s The Phenomenology of the Social World.
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Barber, M.D. (2020). History, the Sciences, and Disinterested Observers: A Dialogue Between Alfred Schutz and Thomas Seebohm. In: Nenon, T. (eds) Thomas Seebohm on the Foundations of the Sciences. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 105. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23661-8_3
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