[lit-ideas] Re: Patty Duke & The Apriori [part 2of 2]
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2009 08:05:57 +0900
On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 3:19 AM, Walter C. Okshevsky <wokshevs@xxxxxx>wrote:
>
> So, if you want to know what "love" means, give up the Cartesian effort to
> identify its underlying essence across differing appearances, and simply go
> look at people who say they are in love and attribute "being in love" to
> others
> and then find out what movies they are seeing, what kinds of foods they are
> eating, what they're doing to and with each others' bodies, minds and
> souls,
> etc.
>
I am instantly reminded of the opening of Howard Becker's *Tricks of the
Trade.* Becker notes that, like most students at the University of Chicago,
he quickly
acquired the habit of asking, "How do you define that?" Then he
learned from sociologist Everett Hughes the trick of changing the
question. When discussing, for example, the nature of ethnic groups,
students would thrash around endlessly trying to find a list of
necessary and sufficient attributes. Hughes suggested instead that an
ethnic group exists when both those inside the group and those outside
the group say that it does. The interaction defines the group instead
of vice-versa.
Now I find myself curious, wondering if behind this tale there lurks
the banker/phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, described by the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy as follows,
Alfred Schutz, more than any other phenomenologist, 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 sociology and for economics, with which he was familiar through
> contacts with colleagues of the Austrian school. When Schutz fled Hitler's
> *Anschluss* of Austria and immigrated to the United States in 1939, he
> developed his thought further in relationship to the social sciences,
> American pragmatism, logical empiricism, and to various other fields of
> endeavor such as music and literature. His work has been influential on new
> movements in sociological thought such as ethnomethodology and conversation
> analysis.
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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