"It's About Us": Religious Studies as Human Science

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 355-373
Author(s):  
Lieve Orye
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Folk Psychology ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Human Science ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Kinds ◽  
Ex Nihilo

AbstractThis article argues that, in order to understand religious studies's debate over reductionism, one should take the social-historical context of the debate and the fteld's subject matter into account. Martin Kusch's work on folk psychology and Ian Hacking's work on 'human kinds' provide an example of how this can take place. The article argues that the study of religion is part of the human sciences and that this area differs from the natural sciences precisely insomuch as the former's subject matter involves a learning reflexive human being. However, large parts of the study of religion exemplify a co-called 'inferior' science-or, as some would say, theology-insomuch as these areas have developed a myopia by looking through distorting Christian glasses. This form of the field seems based on 'knowledge ex nihilo', a shortcoming for a human science because it lacks any conscious reflection on its, and its subject matter's, involvement in society.

scholarly journals Natural Sciences and Social Sciences

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-119
Author(s):  
C.S.A (Kris) van Koppen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
The Social ◽  
Nature And Society

Klintman, Mikael. 2017. Human Sciences and Human Interests: Integrating the Social, Economic, and Evolutionary Sciences. London: Routledge.Jetzkowitz, Jens. 2019. Co-evolution of Nature and Society: Foundations for Interdisciplinary Sustainability Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

scholarly journals Editorial: Life Phenomenology--Movement, Affect and Language

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Stephen Smith ◽  
Tone Saevi ◽  
Rebecca Lloyd ◽  
Scott Churchill
Keyword(s):  
Daily Living ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Human Science ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Linguistic Awareness ◽  
International Human ◽  
Human Kinds ◽  
The Many

The “life phenomenology” theme of the 35th International Human Science Research Conference challenged participants to consider pressing questions of life and of living with others of our own and other-than-human kinds. The theme was addressed by keynote speakers Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Ralph Acampora and David Abram who invoked a motile, affective and linguistic awareness of how we might dwell actively and ethically amongst human communities and with the many life forms we encounter in the wider, wilder world we have in common. Conference participants were provoked to consider the following questions: “How might phenomenology have us recognize a primacy of movement and bring us in touch with the motions and gestures of the multiple lifeworlds of daily living? What worlds from ecology to technology privilege certain animations? What are the affects and effects of an enhanced phenomenological sensitivity? What senses, feelings, emotions and moods of self-affirmation and responsiveness to others sustain us in our daily lives? And to what extent might the descriptive, invocative, provocative language of phenomenology infuse the human sciences and engender a language for speaking directly of life?”

Toward a Theory of Human History

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-273
Author(s):  
Joseph Margolis
Keyword(s):  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Human Science ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Human History ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Argument Proceeds

AbstractI show the sense in which the concept of history as a human science affects our theory of the natural sciences and, therefore, our theory of the unity of the physical and human sciences. The argument proceeds by way of reviewing the effect of the Darwinian contribution regarding teleologism and of post-Darwinian paleonanthropology on the transformation of the primate members of Homo sapiens into societies of historied selves. The strategy provides a novel way of recovering the unity of the sciences: by construing the physical sciences themselves as human sciences ‐ and, therefore, as themselves historied.

scholarly journals Social Construction, HPC Kinds, and the Projectability of Human Categories

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-137
Author(s):  
Jonathan Y. Tsou
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Human Science ◽  
Social Mechanisms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Kinds ◽  
Human Kinds ◽  
Homeostatic Property Cluster

This paper addresses the question of how human science categories yield projectable inferences by critically examining Ron Mallon’s “social role” account of human kinds. Mallon contends that human categories are projectable when a social role produces a homeostatic property cluster (HPC) kind. On this account, human categories are projectable when various social mechanisms stabilize and entrench those categories. Mallon’s analysis obscures a distinction between transitory and robust projectable inferences. I argue that the social kinds discussed by Mallon yield the former, while classifications of biological kinds yield the latter. Classifications from psychiatry (“schizophrenia,” “hysteria”) are discussed as examples.

Understanding Others: Cultural Anthropology with Collingwood and Quine

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guiseppina D’Oro
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Way Of Thinking

Abstract On one meaning of the term “historicism” to be a historicist is to be committed to the claim that the human sciences have a methodology of their own that is distinct in kind and not only in degree from that of the natural sciences. In this sense of the term Collingwood certainly was a historicist, for he defended the view that history is an autonomous discipline with a distinctive method and subject matter against the claim for methodological unity in the sciences. On another interpretation historicism is a relativist way of thinking which denies the possibility of universal and fundamental interpretations of historical or cultural phenomena. In the following I argue that at least in this second sense of “historicism” Collingwood was everything but a historicist. Quine, on the contrary, was nothing but a historicist. The goal of the comparison, however, is not to establish just who, on this definition, was or was not a historicist, but to draw a few conclusions about what a commitment to or rejection of historicism in this sense, tells us about the nature of understanding.

A Science of Mars or of Venus?

Philosophy ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 62 (241) ◽  
pp. 293-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Tiles
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Objective Knowledge ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Superior Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status

For as long as there has been anything worthy of the name of science, there have been those who have criticized its claim to superior knowledge. With the birth and prodigious growth of modern science, the corresponding growthof critical opinion led, in the eighteenth century, to a divorce of the sciences from the humanities around which our educational institutions, and our universities in particular, have been built. It is this divorce which renders problematic the status of the social or human sciences. For the extent to which Man can be an object of scientific knowledge will be questioned by those insisting on an opposition between human knowledge and values as embodied in the humanities, and the dehumanized objective knowledge proclaimed within the natural sciences.

scholarly journals Governing the Anthropocene

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Delanty ◽  
Aurea Mota
Keyword(s):  
Human Science ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Temporal Shift ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
Object Of Knowledge

The growing body of literature on the idea of the Anthropocene has opened up serious questions that go to the heart of the social and human sciences. There has been as yet no satisfactory theoretical framework for the analysis of the Anthropocene debate in the social and human sciences. The notion of the Anthropocene is not only a condition in which humans have become geologic agents, thus signalling a temporal shift in Earth history: it can be seen as a new object of knowledge and an order of governance. A promising direction for theorizing in the social and human science is to approach the notion of the Anthropocene as exemplified in new knowledge practices that have implications for governance. It invokes new conceptions of time, agency, knowledge and governance. The Anthropocene has become a way in which the human world is re-imagined culturally and politically in terms of its relation with the Earth. It entails a cultural model, that is an interpretative category by which contemporary societies make sense of the world as embedded in the Earth, and articulate a new kind of historical self-understanding, by which an alternative order of governance is projected. This points in the direction of cosmopolitics – and thus of a ‘Cosmopolocene’ – rather than a geologization of the social or in the post-humanist philosophy, the end of the human condition as one marked by agency.

scholarly journals Legal Research Methodology and the Dream of Interdisciplinarity

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irma J Kroeze
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Science ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Transdisciplinary Research ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Multidisciplinary Research ◽  
Legal Research ◽  
Basic Premise ◽  
Professional Discipline ◽  
The Social

There are increasing calls for academics to abandon "traditional" disciplinary research and to engage in multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary research.  The argument is that this will serve to break down working in "silos" and somehow lead to more innovative research.  This article examines the concepts of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research to determine if this kind of research is possible in legal research.  The basic premise is that science is unified by the need for some kind of justification, arguably in the form of falsifiability of theories.  But science is also divided into natural, social and human sciences and this article argues that this division is based on methodological differences.  Whilst the natural sciences employ a mostly empiricist methodology and the human sciences employ a mostly rationalist methodology, the social sciences seem to employ a mixture of the two methodologies.  Law is a human science and moreover a professional discipline.  Some argue that this professional nature militates against multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary (MIT) research as it requires law students to be taught how to "think like a lawyer".  The article concludes that most law researchers engage in multidisciplinary research on a regular basis, but that interdisciplinary research is highly unlikely and transdisciplinary research almost never happens.

scholarly journals Emphaty as the foundation of the social sciences and of social life: a reading of Husserl's phenomenology of transcendental intersubjectivity

2002 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 563-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frédéric Vandenberghe
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Communicative Action ◽  
Transcendental Phenomenology ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Starting with an overview of possible solutions to the problem of social order, the author presents a non-acritical reconstruction of Edmund Husserl's transcendental phenomenology of intersubjectivity as a sympathetic alternative to Habermas's theory of communicative action. By means of a detailed analysis of the concept of empathy (Einfühlung), he shows that Husserl's phenomenology of intersubjectivity offers a triple foundation of the sciences. As a warrant of the objectivity of the world, it grounds the natural sciences; as a presupposition of sociality, it founds the social sciences; as mediated by culture, it grounds the social sciences as human sciences.

scholarly journals Doing ‘Deep Big History’: Race, landscape and the humanity of H J Fleure (1877–1969)

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-120
Author(s):  
Amanda Rees
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Influence ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Big History

This article argues that current programmes in the human sciences which adopt a multi-disciplinary approach to history need to be wary of treating the knowledge of the natural sciences as being independent of social influence. Such efforts to do ‘Big History’, ‘Deep History’ or co-evolutionary history themselves have a past, and this article suggests that potential practitioners could benefit from considering that historical context. To that end, it explores the career of Herbert John Fleure, a scholar whose career defied disciplinary classification, but who was concerned to understand how the human past and present could be understood as they combined in the physical and social context of their production, and what they implied for the possibility of a human future. It concludes by arguing that Fleure’s major lesson for modern researchers is his confrontation of the contingent nature and political consequences of his conclusions.

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