Personally Embedded Qualitative Social Ontology: Issues from Stein and Husserl

In this study, I deal with Husserl’s and Stein’s social ontology with reference to Husserl’s and Stein’s works in the years 1917–1925, in particular Husserl’s Ideas II and Stein’s Beiträge and their intricate intellectual authorship. I point out some of the differences between Husserl’s and Stein’s gaze on the social landscape, but I also claim that both focus on the relationship between, on the one hand, personal identity and “personally living”, and on the other, personal collectives and “socially living”. How does being part of a certain type of collective contribute to individuating the person I am? How may the personal being felicitously meet the social being? These are some of the crucial questions that Husserl’s and Stein’s phenomenology of the person introduces into social ontology, in making it a personally embedded qualitative social ontology.