ABSTRACT
The work of Alfred Schutz can undeniably be located within the phenomenological tradition in which Edmund Husserl has been taken to be founder. Even though Schutz repeatedly criticized Edmund Husserl’s work and despaired once in a private letter about its “indefensibility”, nevertheless at the end of his life, he described Husserl to his friend Eric. In order to deal with the issue of the meaning that an action has for an actor Max Weber’s basic problem-Schutz insists that one needs to penetrate to the deepest stratum of experience accessible to reflection, out of which the phenomenon of meaning emerges: that is, one must grasp the foundational experience of internal time-consciousness-a central theme of Husserlian phenomenology. An indication of Schutz’s pertinence to the phenomenological tradition can be found in his serious critical engagement with the phenomenology of Husserl, who preferred followers who were, as Dorion Cairns noted, independent thinkers rather subservient disciples.
