ontological phenomenological sociology
The ontological phenomenology also has abundant possibilities to be developed in various directions. There are examples of the ontological phenomenological sociology among various kinds of sociology mentioned above. For instance, one can find the ontological phenomenological sociology in Weber’s theory of social action, since he attempts to clarify the essential structures of social action as the basic category of verstehende Soziologie. In this sense, one could say that, developing his theory of social action, Weber is carrying out the sociological phenomenological reduction and the eidetic reduction implicitly. Weber’s theory of social action as the ontological phenomenological sociology is the fundamental ground for his religious sociology, which, as verstehende Soziologie, is developed on the empirical dimension. The other examples of the ontological phenomenological sociology are Vierkandt’s formal sociology, Parsons’s general theory of action, and Schutz’s phenomenological sociology. Husserl, as a founder of phenomenology, also attempted several times to elaborate the ontological phenomenological sociology; however, to the best of my knowledge, he never sought to develop the empirical phenomenological sociology. Various kinds of the ontological phenomenological sociology that have not yet been conceived could be developed as the ontological foundation of various kinds of empirical phenomenological sociology, for example, the ontological sociology of knowledge as the ontological foundation for the empirical sociology.