Alfred Schütz

An Austrian philosopher who spent most of his working life as a banker in Vienna and later New York, writing sociology and phenomenology on the side before finally gaining an academic post at the New School in his fifties. His major work, Phenomenology of the Social World, connected Edmund Husserl's phenomenology to Max Weber's sociology, giving social science a philosophical account of how people actually experience and interpret shared, everyday reality. His influence widened considerably after his Collected Papers were published posthumously in the 1960s.