Describes the changing sounds of the rain, the slow soft sprinkle, the drip-drop tinkle, the sounding pounding roaring rain, and the fresh wet silent after-time of rain.

Offers a philosophical exploration of the pervasiveness of place. Presenting an account of the role of place in human experience, this book points to place's indispensability in navigation and orientation. The role of the lived body in matters of place isconsidered, and the characteristics of built places are explored.

Georg Simmel: an introduction by K. P. Etzkorn.--The conflict in modern culture.--On the concept and tragedy of culture.--A chapter in the philosophy of value.--Sociological aesthetics.--On aesthetic quantities.--On the third dimension in art.--The dramatic actor and reality.--Psychological and ethnological studies on music.

This book contains the unfinished manuscript and working notes of the book Merleau-Ponty was writing when he died.

In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism.

The Structures of the Life-World is the final focus of twenty-seven years of Alfred Schutz's labor, encompassing the fruits of his work between 1932 and his death in 1959. This book represents Schutz's seminal attempt to achieve a comprehensive grasp of the nature of social reality. Here he integrates his theory of relevance with his analysis of social structures. Thomas Luckmann, a former student of Schutz's, completed the manuscript for publication after Schutz's untimely death.

In Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning, Eugene Gendlin examines the edge of awareness, where language emerges from nonlanguage.

The Sociology of Knowledge in Weimar Germany: Its Background and Context i Any serious attempt to understand the distinctive nature of the German tradition ...

This book reformulates the sociological subdiscipline known as the sociology of knowledge. Knowledge is presented as more than ideology, including as well false consciousness, propaganda, science and art.

_Ideology and Utopia_ argues that ideologies are mental fictions whose function is to veil the true nature of a given society. They originate unconsciously in the minds of those who seek to stabilise a social order. Utopias are wish dreams that inspire the collective action of opposition groups which aim at the entire transformation of society. Mannheim shows these two opposing elements to dominate not only our social thought but even unexpectedly to penetrate into the most scientific theories in philosophy, (...) history and the social sciences. This new edition contains a new preface by Bryan S. Turner which describes Mannheim's work and critically assesses its relevance to modern sociology. The book is published with a comprehensive bibliography of Mannheim's major works. (shrink)

Su"ender and catch: give so you can receive, where the giving is your whole self, in a total experience. This is scarcely new on the American scene, and it is ancient knowledge, East and West. The fears of total surrender, the fears of self-revelation and of total abandon, although genuine, are likewise not new. Yet Kurt H. Wolff does attempt something new here, an epistemologi cal essay with the help of this old idea: his subtitle is 'experience and inquiry today'. (...) He tries to formulate an integrated view which incorporates in the theory of total experience not only the accepted component- esthetics, religion, the recent American experience - but also a metaphysics, a phenomenology, a theory of perception, a social philosophy and a methodology of the social sciences, even a philosophy of history and psychopathology. Phenomenology (especially Alfred Schutz), the critical Frankfurt school (especially Adorno and Marcuse), sociology (especially Georg Simmel), and existentialism (especially Camus) are tied in together. It all looks topsy-turvy at first. We have here scraps of a diary, fragments of correspondence, a stray adolescent love letter, notes on notes on field work, and notes and comments on tutorial seminars plus long excerpts from students' essays, a stray paper in a learned journal summarizing the core of the book, comments piled on comments and a web of self-references, literary criticisms, and pieces of poetry, plus a rich scholarly apparatus. (shrink)

This innovative introduction to research in the social sciences guides students and new researchers through the maze of research traditions, cultures of inquiry and epistemological frameworks. It introduces the underlying logic of ten cultures of inquiry: ethnography; quantitative behavioral science; phenomenology; action research; hermeneutics; evaluation research; feminist research; critical social science; historical-comparative research; and theoretical research. It clarifies conceptual and intellectual traditions in research, and puts researchers firmly in the investigative saddle - able to choose, justify, and explain the intellectual (...) framework and personal rationale of their research. (shrink)

In this extended prose poem—a text that reads as much as a work of art as important scholarship—Kurt H. Wolff has created a work of phenomenology that goes far beyond the typical methods of empirical social science to embrace field work as an extraordinary openness to being. Including personal letters to Wolff from Hannah Arendt and Hermann Bloch, the book portrays a fertile mind's reckoning with pre-phenomenal being in a way that dances between the realms of intellectual consideration and the (...) surrender of will to the intoxication of lived experience. (shrink)