Resilience and Responsiveness: Alfred’s Schutz’s Finite Provinces of Meaning

Michael Barber, Ph.D., received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1985. He is Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. He is the author of 7 monographs, including The Participating Citizen: A Biography of Alfred Schutz (SUNY, 2004), which won the Ballard Prize in Phenomenology in 2007. He also published Religion and Humor as Emancipating Provinces of Meaning (Springer 2017). He is the editor of Schutzian Research since 2009. He has edited seven other volumes including The Anthem Companion to Alfred Schutz (Anthem Press, 2022); The Interrelation of Phenomenology, Social Sciences, and the Arts with Jochen Dreher (Springer 2014); Alfred Schutz: Schriften zur Literatur, vol 8, Alfred Schutz Werkausgabe, with Jochen Dreher (UVK, 2013); and Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers 6: Literary Reality and Relationships (Springer 2013). He has published over a hundred articles and papers on what might be called the phenomenology of the social world. He has focused on authors such as Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, Emmanuel Levinas, and Max Scheler, and his papers have appeared in Husserl Studies, Human Studies, and in handbooks published by Routledge and Oxford University Press. He has held various official positions in phenomenological societies such as the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, The International Alfred Schutz Circle for Phenomenology and Interpretative Social Science, and the Society for Phenomenology and Religious Experience.