Abstract

Alfred Schütz (1899–1959) studied law and the social sciences in Vienna, and, using the work of Edmund Husserl, sought to provide a philosophical account of the social life-world to support the verstehende sociology of Max Weber. Schütz wrote his The Phenomenology of the Social World in Vienna, before fleeing Hitler’s Anschluss and coming to the United States in 1939, where he spent the next twenty years extending his philosophical work into such areas as semiotics, multiple realities, and assorted philosophical questions.