Clifford Geertz - Philosophical Influence

Philosophical Influence

Despite his discontent with most academic philosophy at his time, Geertz was largely influenced by two philosophers: Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Drawing on the tradition of ordinary language philosophy, he adopted the proposition of thick description from the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle and imported the concept of family resemblances into anthropology from the post-analytic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He also introduced Alfred Schütz's...distinctions among predecessors, consociates, contemporaries and successors, distinctions that have become commonplace in anthropology' in his wake. Geertz stressed how the links between 'consociate-contemporary-predecessor-successor... the umwelt-mitwelt-vorwelt-vogelwelt formulation' of Schutz's phenomenology.