Dual Vision

<p>This study originally published in 1977 focuses on a critical examination of the life-work of Alfred Schutz the most important and influential ‘father’ of several recent schools of empirical social research.</p><p>The author shows why Shutz and his followers fail in their attempts to ‘humanize’ empirical social science. The problems they encounter he argues are due to their attempt to achieve a methodological synthesis of self-determining subjectivity and empirical criteria of validation based on Schutz’s heuristic adoption of relevant ideas from Weber and Husserl. This is in effect an artificial union of subjectivity and objectivity – their ‘dual vision’ – that satisfies neither phenomenological nor naturalist perspectives. Dr Gorman suggests that the radical implications of phenomenology must lead to a consistent socially-conscious method of inquiry and in a final chapter he re-defines the methodological implications of phenomenology with the aid of existential and Marxist categories.</p>