Abstract

This article reexamines Alfred Schutz’s famous 1944 Stranger essay and the initial criticism of Aron Gurwitsch. I side with Schutz in thinking of the refugee as a special type of stranger. Then to respond to the charge that the essay is not philosophical enough from Gurwitsch, I read Schutz’s notion of the strange with Husserl’s notion of homeworld and Levinas’s notion of fecundity. This allows us to see the philosophical depth of doing a phenomenology of the stranger and strangeness.