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This paper addresses the notion of communicative action on the basis of Alfred Schutz' writings. In Schutz' work, communication is of particular significance and its importance is often neglected by phenomenologists. Communication plays a crucial role in his first major work, the Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt from 1932, yet communication is also a major feature in his unfinished works which were later completed posthumously by Thomas Luckmann: The Structures of the Life World (, ). In these texts, Schutz sometimes refers to 'communicative action,' and he comes to ascribe a crucial role to communication within the domain of the life world he calls everyday life. Based on Schutz' texts, I shall first attempt to critically reconstruct the defining features of his notion of communication and communicative action. As a result, it emerges that Schutz' notion of communication, particularly in its early incarnation, seems to be, at first glance, characterized by a dichotomy between virtual communication, that is communicative action in a narrow sense, and non-virtual communication. As I want to show with respect to the seemingly established dichotomous distinction between 'mediated' and 'immediate social action,' Schutz himself started to overcome this dichotomy. Based on this thesis, I will try to sketch a basic outline of a theory of communicative action, a theory less formulated by Schutz' than built on Schutz' writings. As the idea of communicative action, and particularly the transgression of the distinction between mediated and immediate action, affects the very structures of the life-world described by Schutz and Luckmann, I will ultimately demonstrate that any mundane phenomenology of the life-world requires a triangulatory method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heidegger's critique of metaphysics is central to his attempt to re-instantiate the question of being. This paper examines Heidegger's critique of metaphysics by looking at the relationship between metaphysics and thought. This entails an identification of the intimate relationship Heidegger maintains exists between philosophy and metaphysics, an analysis of Heidegger's critique of this association, and a discussion of his proposal that philosophy has been so damaged by its association with metaphysics that it must be replaced with meditative thinking. It is not quite clear, however, how the overcoming of metaphysical thinking is to occur especially given Heidegger's insistence that relying on human will to effect an alteration in thinking simply re-instantiates the metaphysical perspective to be overcome. While several critics have argued Heidegger has no solution to this issue, instead holding that thought must simply be open to being's 'self'-transformation if and when it occurs, I turn to Heidegger's notion of trace and a number of scattered comments on the relationship between meditative thinking and willing as non-willing to show Heidegger: (a) was aware of this issue; and (b) tried to resolve it by recognising a reconceptualised notion of willing not based on or emanating from the aggressive willing of metaphysics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to philosopher Paul Ricoeur, human action has a quasi-textual quality it requires a "reading," a type of inquiry, and it is different from the method of natural science. Ricoeur defines his hermeneutical method in great part over and against the "received view" of proper scientific method. In doing so he seems to espouse methodological separatism. Methodological separatists argue that the differences between human and natural sciences are radical ones, having to do with the fundamental logic of their inquiry. Among the differences are claims about disparities in the logic of hypothesis justification and the logic of explanation. Anyone familiar with the whole of Ricoeur's work knows that a pervasive and underlying interest which runs throughout his writings is the overcoming of dichotomies, revealing false differences and untenable conciliatory moves. In fact, his work is refreshing in its attempt to preserve a creative tension between differences of all sorts, a view which stems from his own interpretation of the dialectic.

The central thesis articulated and defended throughout this article is "that language is not about objects and experience, it is constitutive of objects and experience," or "that the world of "things" has no meaningful structure except in connection with the standards employed to ascribe qualities to it." The positivist doctrine of meaning underlies the familiar fact-value dichotomy for "the radical separation between empirical inquiry and normative judgment "derives ultimately" both from the denial of meaning to value statements and the empiricist construal of the role of consciousness." Linguistic analysts relying on common or stock use of expressions, have tended to neglect the extent to which there is an "ownership of the means of enunciation" and the degree to which "the "rules" one locates constitute a choice of power constituencies." Discursive practices "delimit the range of objects that can be identified, define the perspectives that one can legitimately regard as knowledge and constitute certain kinds of persons as agents of knowledge."