Abstract
The idea of reconstructing nursing science upon phenomenological or hermeneutic foundations faces difficulties in generating a truly theoretical element in a science thus based. This reflects the nature of the intentional concepts used to describe and explain human subjectivity within those approaches. The methodology of Alfred Schütz was explicitly designed to solve this problem, but seems, in one reading, to have only very limited scope, and in another reading to misapply the term “theory”. Besides, it embodies an unduly passive construal of the hermeneutic stance. These results indicate that the phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches should be supplemented with a “third person approach” in nursing science.
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