This book presents the remarkable correspondence between Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, emigre philosophers influenced by Edmund Husserl, who fled Europe on the eve of World War II and ultimately became seminal figures in the establishment of phenomenology in the United States. Their deep and lasting friendship grew out of their mutual concern with the question of the connections between science and the life-world.
Interwoven with philosophical exchange is the two scholars' encounter with the unfamiliar problems of American academic life―what Gurwitsch called the "passology" of exile. Apart from its brilliant and moving portrait of two distinguished men, the correspondence holds rich significance for current issues in philosophy and the social sciences.
Alfred Schütz (13 April 1899 – 20 May 1959) was an Austrian social scientist, whose work bridged sociological and phenomenological traditions to form a social phenomenology. Notably, Schütz is "gradually achieving recognition as one of the foremost philosophers of social science of the [twentieth] century". Schütz "attempted to relate the thought of Edmund Husserl to the social world and the social sciences. His Phenomenology of the Social World supplied philosophical foundations for Max Weber's existing sociology and for economics", with which he was familiar
Wonderful collection of letters from two of Husserl's most humble and most important (even if seldom read) students. The letters together make a narrative out of the two scholars' lives, how they lived as "exiles," floating from teaching position to teaching position, how they became "with book," as Schutz liked to say, and their impact not only on intellectual hubs, such as The New School for Social Research, but on the current thinkers of the time, e.g., on Merleau-Ponty. (In an emotionally desiccating letter to Schutz, Gurwitsch says that he felt that a lecture series he had done prior to the war inspired Merleau-Ponty's marriage of a phenomenological account of perception and Gestalt psychology, but due to his having to leave Europe to escape fascism, he'd never be acknowledged nor able to contribute to a theme he saw himself as developing.) Plenty of thoughtful insights and readings of Husserl's work from two people who knew the man himself.