Alfred Schütz, Felix Kaufmann: 1895–1949 (1950)

Schütz’s memorial essay combines intellectual biography with a portrait of philosophical integrity. Beginning with Simmel’s observation that a life realizes only part of its possibilities, it interprets Kaufmann’s career through the tension between incompleteness and coherence:

Felix Kaufmann's life work, so tragically interrupted by his sudden death, must needs be fragmentary in this sense, yet in another sense it is a consistent whole and this in spite of its astonishing diversity.

The essay traces that coherence through philosophy, mathematics, jurisprudence, and social-scientific methodology. These fields appear as connected settings for a sustained investigation of scientific reasoning, not merely as evidence of intellectual breadth.

Kaufmann believed in deductive logic as a fundamental science from which the methodology of both the so-called natural sciences and the social sciences can be derived as a logic of scientific procedure.

The unity Schütz attributes to Kaufmann thus concerns procedure rather than subject matter. Disciplinary disagreements become susceptible to clarification when their logical structure and underlying commitments are made explicit. Schütz connects this methodological conviction with a Socratic practice of discussion: rigorous articulation can advance understanding without requiring superficial reconciliation. Kaufmann’s personal kindness does not weaken this demand.

But as a thinker, he would not tolerate any fallacy, any subterfuge, any dodging of the issues.

This insistence links the intellectual biography to the memorial’s ethical portrait. Exactness is both a requirement of inquiry and a responsibility toward interlocutors.

Husserl provides the first major formative influence. Kaufmann’s attraction centers on the early analyses of logic, meaning, and the analytical a priori, more than on transcendental subjectivity. Schütz also emphasizes the personal force of this relationship and Kaufmann’s institutional commitment through his work with Marvin Farber in establishing the International Phenomenological Society and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Yet fidelity to phenomenology does not imply philosophical exclusiveness. Kaufmann engages Husserl, Carnap, Cassirer, and Dewey by critically identifying common problems while preserving substantive disagreements. Accordingly, Schütz distinguishes his participation in Vienna Circle discussions from membership and notes his opposition to basic neopositivist positions.

Mathematics and physics supply another formative discipline, expressed particularly in Kaufmann’s investigation of eliminating the infinite from mathematics. Kelsen’s pure theory of law brings him into social science. Schütz explains Kelsen’s distinction between juridical norms and sociological facts before identifying Kaufmann’s revisions: a phenomenological replacement for neo-Kantian epistemology, an analysis of substantive norms and sanctions, and attention to the human conduct underlying the normative realm. Jurisprudence becomes a testing ground for the relation between logical foundations and disciplinary problems.

These investigations developed alongside an unsalaried university appointment and a demanding business career. Exchanges with economists, sociologists, jurists, and mathematicians contributed to Kaufmann’s general methodology of the social sciences. Schütz distinguishes the German Methodenlehre der Sozialwissenschaften (1936) from the substantially rewritten English Methodology of the Social Sciences (1944). Dewey’s theory of inquiry contributed to that development, although Kaufmann rejected his theory of meaning. The division of Kaufmann’s writings into general and special sections expresses his characteristic procedure: establish logical and methodological foundations, then examine their application within particular sciences.

The account of exile joins professional opportunity to historical catastrophe. Alvin Johnson’s invitation following Hitler’s invasion of Austria offered Kaufmann escape and the possibility of concentrating fully on scholarship. Schütz recalls his gratitude alongside his distress over events and his friends’ suffering.

The closing recollection returns to the opening theme of incompleteness. Responding to Schütz’s concern that fundamental social-scientific problems had been omitted, Kaufmann distinguishes deliberate methodological restriction from intellectual incapacity. Investigating the logical structure of scientific inquiry requires leaving some underlying questions outside the immediate frame. Schütz thereby qualifies his portrait of systematic unity: Kaufmann’s project remains coherent without claiming to exhaust philosophy. Its limits express disciplined judgment, while its unfinished possibilities give the memorial its sense of loss.