1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Alfred Schütz’s 1932 review essay presents Husserl’s French Méditations cartésiennes as far more than an introductory text. It reconstructs the five meditations as a radical renewal of philosophy from transcendental subjectivity, while also marking their importance for the future of phenomenological social theory.
This brief letter is a small document of intellectual sociability: Schütz writes to a friend immediately after returning from Paris, carrying with him both a periodical and a book. Its central movement is the conversion of travel into exchange—of journals, essays, gifts, and good wishes. The note shows scholarship not as solitary production but as a material practice of circulation: one reads because another has noticed, acquired, transported, lent, and requested the return of a text.
This file is a single scholarly-private letter, not an essay or collection. Its scope is narrow but intellectually dense: Schütz writes from New York to Parsons to explain the delayed delivery of a long critique of The Structure of Social Action, distinguish that critique from his comments on Parsons’s unpublished manuscript, and arrange an in-person discussion. The letter’s governing claim is that Parsons’s theory touches the central problems of social science so deeply that it cannot be responsibly handled in a short review.
Genre and scope: This is a single-author philosophical-methodological essay with an attached 1939 programmatic draft (“I. Teil”) and the 1940 article (“II. Teil”). Its question is how Husserl’s phenomenology can ground the social sciences while preserving their mundane, natural-attitude orientation.
Alfred Schütz’s essay reads William James’s doctrine of the “stream of thought” as a decisive anticipation of phenomenological problems later made explicit by Husserl. Its aim is not merely historical comparison but conceptual translation: Schütz shows how James’s psychological descriptions of personal consciousness, continuity, fringe, and thematic direction can be interpreted as analyses of intentional life, horizonality, reflection, and synthesis.
Genre and scope: despite collected-volume page headers, the supplied file is a single 1942 scholarly essay by Alfred Schütz; no contributor-chapter structure is present. Its seven sections reconstruct Scheler’s theory of intersubjectivity and replace it with Schütz’s own “Generalthese vom alter ego.”
This is a single methodological essay: Schütz critiques the loose use of “rationality” in social theory, beginning from Parsons’s definition of rational action as the scientifically intelligible choice of adequate means to possible ends. His thesis is not that actors are irrational, but that rational action has its proper home on the theoretical plane of social science, not in ordinary orientation. The essay therefore separates planes of experience—native, stranger, cartographer; actor, observer, theorist—and warns that concepts cannot be transferred unchanged across them.
This social-psychological essay uses a general theory of interpretation to analyze the newcomer who seeks durable acceptance in a group. The immigrant is Schütz’s exemplary case, but the type includes entrants into clubs, families, universities, armies, villages, and labor markets. Its scope is the “approach” that precedes assimilation: the moment when a social world must be learned as a practical environment.
The source is an edited German-language presentation centered on Alfred Schütz’s 1945 study of multiple realities. Its volume-form matters: Schütz supplies the central philosophical-sociological contribution, while the editorial framing, notes, and bibliographical apparatus place the text in conversation with William James, Bergson, Husserl, and debates over social-scientific method. The chapters and sections move from James’s psychology of reality-sense to the everyday world, then to finite provinces of meaning, fantasy, dream, and scientific theory.
This file is a single-author theoretical essay in six sections. Schütz’s scope is at once modest and foundational: he sketches a sociology of how knowledge is distributed in modern everyday life. The opening premise is that no modern person, and no fellow human being, can fully comprehend the whole lifeworld. People use technologies, markets, legal orders, and institutions through trust and routine rather than full understanding. Schütz therefore redirects the sociology of knowledge from ideology alone to the ordinary organization of what is known, trusted, ignored, or investigated.
Alfred Schütz’s essay reconstructs Sartre’s theory of intersubjectivity while arguing that its most brilliant analyses end in a practical solipsism. The article treats Sartre’s inquiry as separable from existentialism’s broader claims: even critics must acknowledge that the problem of the Other is where Sartre is strongest.
This file is a single scholarly review-essay by Alfred Schütz. Its scope is Kurt Goldstein’s clinical theory of aphasia and its philosophical significance. Schütz’s central claim is that brain-injury language disorders do not merely show local failures of words or brain centers; they reveal how consciousness structures a shared world through abstraction, typification, relevance, and communicative expectation.