Calendar | Conference

Phenomenology and Social Ontology: Contest or Conversion?

Potsdam, 13 - 14 October 2022

Historically speaking, the connection between phenomenology and social ontology could not be more intimate, given that the term “social ontology” was first introduced by Husserl himself. However, the further development of these fields seem to have parted ways – an estrangement that John Seale expresses in a response to Hubert Dreyfus in the following way: Phenomenologists “do not have much to contribute to the topic […] of the logical structure of social and institutional reality” (Searle, 2001, 284). If this is a common view about the relation between phenomenology and social ontology, it is worth to reconsider the origins, paths, and systematic relations between these domains of philosophizing.