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This book extends Alfred Schutz's "On Multiple Realities" by describing the provinces of meaning of play, music, religious ritual, and African-American folkloric humor. Throughout these provinces, the author traces two themes: resilience and responsiveness. In resilience, individuals or communities run up against obstacles, imposed relevances, which they come to terms with, or give meaning to (in phenomenological parlance), by modifying, evading, overcoming, or accepting them.
Responsiveness emerges from Schutz's idea of making music together, which the author takes further by analyzing the mimetic encounter with the other and the asymmetries in listening to music, and, especially, by showing how the features of the cognitive style of music as a province of meaning affect sociality, disposing us to be more vulnerable and attentive to each other's non-conceptual, musical meanings. This text appeals to upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students as well as to faculty in philosophy.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Finite Provinces of Meaning, Resilience, Responsiveness, The Plan of this Book.- Chapter 2: Imposed Relevances and Resilience.- Chapter 3. The Province of Play: Creativity, Responsiveness, and Ethics.- Chapter 4. The Implications of Play: Resilience, Everyday Life, and Ethics.- Chapter 5: The Experience of Music: Embodied, Holistic, and Intersubjective.- Chapter 6: Finite Provinces of Meaning and Responsiveness, Responsibility, and Jazz.- Chapter 7: Religious/Spiritual Ritual and Intersubjective Responsiveness.- Chapter 8: African-American Folkloric Humor: Resilience, Province of Meaning, Responsiveness.- 9. Conclusion: Phenomenological Intentionality and Looking-Glass Sociality.
About the author
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.
