The purpose of this lecture is to celebrate the memory of Aron Gurwitsch by examining and enlarging the domain of phenomenological clarification of some elements of what Gurwitsch called the logic of reality. Chief among those elements are the nature of the taken-for-grantedness of our existential belief, the difference between presentive and non-presentive indices of reality and the ground for the self-illumination of the world of working.

For Husserl, the _homeworld_ is the tacit, taken-for-granted sphere of experiences, understanding, and situations marking out a world that is comfortable, usual, and “the way things are and should be.” Always, according to Husserl, the homeworld is in some mode of lived mutuality with an _alienworld_—a world as seen as a realm of difference, atypicality, and otherness. In this article, I draw on British-African novelist Doris Lessing’s 1969 novel, _The Four-Gated City_, to consider the shifting homeworld of protagonist Martha Quest, (...) a young white African woman emigrating to battle-scarred London immediately after World War II. Throughout the novel, Quest finds herself in unfamiliar or challenging situations where the world she takes for granted is called into question. Lessing draws on these life-testing experiences to portray Quest’s shifting understandings of other individuals’ homeworlds that at first she sees as atypical, abnormal, or unreal. (shrink)

Alfred Schutz is, without a doubt, one of the phenomenologists that contributed the most to the reflection on how to apply insights from phenomenological philosophy to the, empirical and theoretical, human and social sciences. However, his work tends to be neglected by many of the current advocates of phenomenology within these disciplines. In the present paper, I intend to remedy this situation. In order to do so, I will systematically revisit his mundane and social-scientifically oriented account of phenomenology, which, as (...) I shall show, emerges from a theoretical confrontation with the Husserlian distinction between transcendental phenomenology and phenomenological psychology. (shrink)

Frank Welz's "Kritik der Lebenswelt" undertakes a sociology of knowledge criticism of the work of Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz that construes them as developing absolutist, egological systems opposed to the "processual" worldview prominent since the modern rise of natural science. Welz, though, misunderstands the work of Schutz and Husserl and neglects how their focus on consciousness and eidetic features pertains to the kind of reflection that one must undertake if one would avoid succumbing to absolutism, that uncovers the presuppositions (...) of the processual worldview itself, and that secures a domain distinctive of philosophy over against sociology. Finally, Welz's charge that Schutz favors a Neo-Kantian social scientific methodology contradictory to his phenomenology neglects the levels of Schutz's discourse and ignores how the Weberian ideal-typical approach can be subsumed within phenomenology. (shrink)