One of the main intellectual traditions that has been responsible for the anti-positivist position has been phenomenology, a philosophy that is concerned with the question of how individuals make sense of the world around them and how in particular the philosopher should bracket out preconceptions in his or her grasp of that world. The initial application of phenomenological ideas to the social sciences is attributed to the work of Alfred Schutz (1899-1959), whose work did not come to the notice of most English-speaking social scientists until the transla¬tion from German of his major writings in the 1960s, some twenty or more years after they had been writ-ten. His work was profoundly influenced by Weber's concept of Verstehen, as well as by phenomenological philosophers, like Husserl. Schutz's position is well captured in the following passage, which has been quoted on numerous occasions: