Abstract
Social science is in crisis. By this “crisis” I mean that the genuine scientific character of social science itself lies in a questionable state. Despite many claiming to do social science, these claimants struggle to cohere with one another as to what is meant by “social science”. The task of social science as it will be defined in this book is (co-opting Sartre) the study of “man in situation”: to understand the world as it is for “man”. Following Husserl, such a science receives its “genuine character” insofar as it is the pursuit of nonpractical knowledge. My focus in this book is with those who have advocated this idea of social science—though none have done so in these exact terms—and why they have consistently failed to realise it. In this first chapter I lay the basis for how we know there is a crisis and how it is I intend to go about analysing it with a future aim to resolving it. This will contextualise my understanding of phenomenology in relation to the philosophy of social science and why I have chosen Religious Studies as a useful case study for examining and demonstrating the consequences of this crisis.
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Notes
- 1.
For ease of exposition I have referred almost exclusively to Social Science.
- 2.
- 3.
“Wer” is predominantly found in the concept of wergild: the price someone would have to pay for killing another person.
- 4.
An alternate translation also appears as Appendix A in Crisis.
- 5.
Only Parts I and II of Crisis were published in Philosophia. Husserl died in 1938 before finishing Part III which was then completed by his research assistant Eugen Fink. Moran has suggested the published text is a “Fink-Husserl cooperative effort” (2012, 13–14).
- 6.
A similar issue may occur in Weinsheimer and Marshall’s translation of Gadamer’s Truth and Method (2013, 3). More detailed study is required, beyond the scope of this book, to be sure of how Gadamer properly meant the phrase to be used.
- 7.
The book would go through various editions and alterations.
- 8.
I will use “Religious Studies” and “religious studies” in the same fashion I have used “Social Science” and “social science”.
- 9.
A similar argument is found in Gadamer (2013, 3–16).
- 10.
- 11.
The full meaning of this term word will be unpacked in Chap. 4.
- 12.
Strictly speaking, “history” as an empirical discipline (Hook 1944, 44), should also be regarded as a way of doing social science in this sense.
- 13.
“Proper” and “pseudo” replace “good” and “bad” in Husserl ’s discussion of a “normative science” (i.e. “theory of science”) (1970a, 81–86).
- 14.
While I suspect there to be a number of similarities between Foucault and the position argued here (particularly in The Order of Things (1966[2002a]) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969[2002b])), his criticism of philosophical anthropology (see Schacht 1990) turns him away from the very issue I wish to discuss.
- 15.
That I have focused on these five phenomenologists to the exclusion of others (e.g. Merleau-Ponty , Gadamer, Ricoeur and Levinas ) is based primarily on their explicit discussions of philosophical anthropology as well as their key positions in instigating the various branches of phenomenology.
- 16.
To do so would, ironically, be a violation of this pursuit of nonpractical knowledge .
- 17.
This does not mean this view originates with Toulmin .
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Tuckett, J. (2018). Introduction. In: The Idea of Social Science and Proper Phenomenology. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 28. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92120-4_1
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