Kurt Wolff has written principally in two veins (in English) for the last fifty years, 1) on sociology, epistemology (sociology of knowledge) and the philosophy of sociology; and 2) on the relevance of his formulation of "surrender and catch" to human experience, particularly in its cogni tive forms. He published Trying Sociology in 1974, which contains his writings on sociology, and Surrender and Catch: Experience and Inquiry Today in 1976, which contains his writings on surrender-and-catch. In more recent years, he has published two books, 0 Loma Constituting a Self (1977-1984) in 1989 and Survival and Sociology: Vindicating the Human Subject (1991). Both of the more recent books add a third vein which is autobiographical and which moves back and forth between the previously established approaches in the earlier works. Transformation in the Writing is the most ambitious to date, because, as Wolff points out in the beginning, it contains writings that "fall quite obviously into three classes: autobiographical; sociology of knowledge, sociology, poetry, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory; and our time and its sociological analysis. " The task of this book is to illuminate the connections among these three classes. Wolff has engaged in autobiographical writing his entire life, though this approach to writing has only in recent years grown closer to his intel lectual preoccupations with sociology and philosophy."

Kurt Wolff has written principally in two veins (in English) for the last fifty years, 1) on sociology, epistemology (sociology of knowledge) and the philosophy of sociology; and 2) on the relevance of his formulation of "surrender and catch" to human experience, particularly in its cogni tive forms. He published Trying Sociology in 1974, which contains his writings on sociology, and Surrender and Catch: Experience and Inquiry Today in 1976, which contains his writings on surrender-and-catch. In more recent years, he has published two books, 0 Loma Constituting a Self (1977-1984) in 1989 and Survival and Sociology: Vindicating the Human Subject (1991). Both of the more recent books add a third vein which is autobiographical and which moves back and forth between the previously established approaches in the earlier works. Transformation in the Writing is the most ambitious to date, because, as Wolff points out in the beginning, it contains writings that "fall quite obviously into three classes: autobiographical; sociology of knowledge, sociology, poetry, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory; and our time and its sociological analysis. " The task of this book is to illuminate the connections among these three classes. Wolff has engaged in autobiographical writing his entire life, though this approach to writing has only in recent years grown closer to his intel lectual preoccupations with sociology and philosophy."

This issue of Human Studies is dedicated to Alfred Schutz on the twen- ty-fifth anniversary of his death. It also is meant as a fond and admiring salute to one of Schutz's most outstanding students and his intellectual biographer, Helmut R. Wagner, on the occasion ofhis eightieth birthday. The first paper, by Wagner himself, is the first of three that were presented at the session in honor of Alfred Schutz, which was chaired by George Psathas, at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society on March 9, 1984 in Boston. It is based on Wagner's intel- lectual biography of Schutz, reviewed in this issue by David M. Ras- mussen, and shows how Wagner found the main conceptual tools of this biography in Schutz's own theoretical work. The second paper, by Jonathan B. Imber, presents a fresh and far-reaching interpretation of Schutz's "The Well-Informed Citizen," and the third, by David M. Rasmussen, compares Schutz with Habermas, especially Habermas's most recent major work, Theory of Communicative Action. The dis- cussion of these three papers by the present author tries to show that they all touch, despite differences in focus and perspec,tive, on a prob- lem in Schutz's conception of phenomenology and social science. In Ingeborg Katharina Helling's essay, the relationship between Al- fred Schutz and Felix Kaufmann, and thus the interplay between phenomenology and the positivism of the Vienna Circle, is analyzed.

Su"ender and catch: give so you can receive, where the giving is your whole self, in a total experience. This is scarcely new on the American scene, and it is ancient knowledge, East and West. The fears of total surrender, the fears of self-revelation and of total abandon, although genuine, are likewise not new. Yet Kurt H. Wolff does attempt something new here, an epistemologi cal essay with the help of this old idea: his subtitle is 'experience and inquiry today'. He tries to formulate an integrated view which incorporates in the theory of total experience not only the accepted component- esthetics, religion, the recent American experience - but also a metaphysics, a phenomenology, a theory of perception, a social philosophy and a methodology of the social sciences, even a philosophy of history and psychopathology. Phenomenology (especially Alfred Schutz), the critical Frankfurt school (especially Adorno and Marcuse), sociology (especially Georg Simmel), and existentialism (especially Camus) are tied in together. It all looks topsy-turvy at first. We have here scraps of a diary, fragments of correspondence, a stray adolescent love letter, notes on notes on field work, and notes and comments on tutorial seminars plus long excerpts from students' essays, a stray paper in a learned journal summarizing the core of the book, comments piled on comments and a web of self-references, literary criticisms, and pieces of poetry, plus a rich scholarly apparatus."

Die Methoden der Unternehmensforschung haben kurz nach dem Aufkommen dieses Wissenschaftszweiges in die verschiedensten Bereiche der technischen Wissenschaften und der Wirtschaftswissenschaften Ein- gang gefunden. VerhaltnismaBig spat und zogernd nur hat sich das Buch Versicherungswesen dieser Methoden bedient. Das vorliegende gibt in sechs Abschnitten einen Dberblick uber die Anwendung von Methoden der Unternehmensforschung im Versicherungswesen. Der Stoff wurde einmal im Hinblick auf die verwendeten Methoden ausge- wahlt, wobei vor aHem die Spieltheorie, die Methode der linearen Pro- gramme und die Monte Carlo-Methode Verwendung GBPlnden und zum anderen im Hinblick auf die Problemstellungen aus dem Gebiete des Versicherungswesens, wobei Fragen der optimalen Entscheidungen im V ordergrund stehen. Die Gliederung des Stoffes richtet sich nach den behandelten Sach- gebieten des Versicherungswesens. Untersuchungen uber Versicherungs- grundlagen, wie Sterbetafel und ZinsfuB, werden zusammen mit der Ermittlung von Versicherungswerten im ersten Abschnitt behandelt. Del' zweite Abschnitt ist den verschiedenen Methoden del' Reserve- schatzunggewidmet und del' dritte Abschnitt befaBt sich mit del' Frage del' optimalen Investitionen del' Rucklagen. Die im vierten Abschnitt angestellten Untersuchungen uber die optimale Ruckversicherung werden im fiinften Abschnitt so verallgemeinert, daB es moglich wird, einen Begriff des optimalen Finanzplanes einzufiihren. SchlieBlich behandelt del' sechste Abschnitt als Anhang mehrere einzelne Probleme, die sich keinem del' vorhergegangenen Abschnitte zuordnen lassen, deren Um- fang auch nicht die Behandlung in einem eigenen Abschnitt gestattet, die abel' doch sachlich dem hier behandelten Problemkreis zugeordnet werden konnen.