This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on ‘excentric positionality’ in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar ‘crisis of experience’ used to diagnose ‘what has gone wrong’, it allows us to re-learn how to work with ‘the experience of (...) crisis’ itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on ‘xeno-communication’. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these ‘excentric’ dynamics in turn suggests new ‘excentric methodologies’ based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. ‘Excentric methodologies’ constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. (shrink)

Firstly, this article outlines the main points made by Peter Winch in his breakthrough book Th e Idea of a Social Science. Its fundamental thesis, inspired by Wittgenstein and his accounts on the relation between language and reality, is the assumption that social sciences engage in philosophical endeavor, because the problems they deal with are not empirical, but conceptual. Following Wittgensteinian line of thought he comes up with the idea that all social action can be explained as rule following and (...) therefore it should be approached by conceptual means other than those used by natural sciences. Secondly, this article explores the impact that The Idea of a Social Science had on the discussion about the nature of social sciences. It outlines it‘s main critiques which deal with Winch‘s conception of philosophy the notion of rule following and descriptive nature of Winch‘s approach. Finally, Winch‘s critique of positivism in social sciences is identifi ed as his main and lasting contribution to social thought. (shrink)