Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences PDF Download

Author: Paul Ricoeur
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107144973
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 319

View

Book Description
John B. Thompson's collection of translated essays forms an illuminating introduction to Paul Ricoeur's prolific contributions to sociological theory.

Author: John S. Nelson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780299110208
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 470

View

Book Description
Opening with an overview of the renewal of interest in rhetoric for inquiries of all kinds, this volume addresses rhetoric in individual disciplines - mathematics, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, political science and history. Drawing from recent literary theory, it suggests the contribution of the humanities to the rhetoric of inquiry and explores communications beyond the academy, particulary in women's issues, religion and law. The final essays speak from the field of communication studies, where the study of rhetoric usually makes its home.

Author: Joel Isaac
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674070046
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

View

Book Description
The human sciences in the English-speaking world have been in a state of crisis since the Second World War. The battle between champions of hard-core scientific standards and supporters of a more humanistic, interpretive approach has been fought to a stalemate. Joel Isaac seeks to throw these contemporary disputes into much-needed historical relief. In Working Knowledge he explores how influential thinkers in the twentieth century's middle decades understood the relations among science, knowledge, and the empirical study of human affairs. For a number of these thinkers, questions about what kinds of knowledge the human sciences could produce did not rest on grand ideological gestures toward "science" and "objectivity" but were linked to the ways in which knowledge was created and taught in laboratories and seminar rooms. Isaac places special emphasis on the practical, local manifestations of their complex theoretical ideas. In the case of Percy Williams Bridgman, Talcott Parsons, B. F. Skinner, W. V. O. Quine, and Thomas Kuhn, the institutional milieu in which they constructed their models of scientific practice was Harvard University. Isaac delineates the role the "Harvard complex" played in fostering connections between epistemological discourse and the practice of science. Operating alongside but apart from traditional departments were special seminars, interfaculty discussion groups, and non-professionalized societies and teaching programs that shaped thinking in sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, science studies, and management science. In tracing this culture of inquiry in the human sciences, Isaac offers intellectual history at its most expansive.

Author: Baha Abu-Laban
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 9780888641342
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 316

View

Book Description
The importance of continued funding of research within the scholarly community, especially in the humanities and social sciences, has become a major consideration as Canadian universities plan for the future.

Author: George Steinmetz
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386887
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 634

View

Book Description
The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences provides a remarkable comparative assessment of the variations of positivism and alternative epistemologies in the contemporary human sciences. Often declared obsolete, positivism is alive and well in a number of the fields; in others, its influence is significantly diminished. The essays in this collection investigate its mutations in form and degree across the social science disciplines. Looking at methodological assumptions field by field, individual essays address anthropology, area studies, economics, history, the philosophy of science, political science and political theory, and sociology. Essayists trace disciplinary developments through the long twentieth century, focusing on the decades since World War II. Contributors explore and contrast some of the major alternatives to positivist epistemologies, including Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, narrative theory, and actor-network theory. Almost all the essays are written by well-known practitioners of the fields discussed. Some essayists approach positivism and anti-positivism via close readings of texts influential in their respective disciplines. Some engage in ethnographies of the present-day human sciences; others are more historical in method. All of them critique contemporary social scientific practice. Together, they trace a trajectory of thought and method running from the past through the present and pointing toward possible futures. Contributors. Andrew Abbott, Daniel Breslau, Michael Burawoy, Andrew Collier , Michael Dutton, Geoff Eley, Anthony Elliott, Stephen Engelmann, Sandra Harding, Emily Hauptmann, Webb Keane, Tony Lawson, Sophia Mihic, Philip Mirowski, Timothy Mitchell, William H. Sewell Jr., Margaret R. Somers, George Steinmetz, Elizabeth Wingrove

Author: Ian Shapiro
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691120577
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 248

View

Book Description
In this captivating yet troubling book, Ian Shapiro offers a searing indictment of many influential practices in the social sciences and humanities today. Perhaps best known for his critique of rational choice theory, Shapiro expands his purview here. In discipline after discipline, he argues, scholars have fallen prey to inward-looking myopia that results from--and perpetuates--a flight from reality. In the method-driven academic culture we inhabit, argues Shapiro, researchers too often make display and refinement of their techniques the principal scholarly activity. The result is that they lose sight of the objects of their study. Pet theories and methodological blinders lead unwelcome facts to be ignored, sometimes not even perceived. The targets of Shapiro's critique include the law and economics movement, overzealous formal and statistical modeling, various reductive theories of human behavior, misguided conceptual analysis in political theory, and the Cambridge school of intellectual history. As an alternative to all of these, Shapiro makes a compelling case for problem-driven social research, rooted in a realist philosophy of science and an antireductionist view of social explanation. In the lucid--if biting--prose for which Shapiro is renowned, he explains why this requires greater critical attention to how problems are specified than is usually undertaken. He illustrates what is at stake for the study of power, democracy, law, and ideology, as well as in normative debates over rights, justice, freedom, virtue, and community. Shapiro answers many critics of his views along the way, securing his position as one of the distinctive social and political theorists of our time.

Author: Sonya Petersson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789176351475
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 332

View

Book Description
The ongoing digitization of culture and society and the ongoing production of new digital objects in culture and society require new ways of investigation, new theoretical avenues, and new multidisciplinary frameworks. In order to meet these requirements, this collection of eleven studies digs into questions concerning, for example: the epistemology of data produced and shared on social media platforms; the need of new legal concepts that regulate the increasing use of artificial intelligence in society; and the need of combinatory methods to research new media objects such as podcasts, web art, and online journals in relation to their historical, social, institutional, and political effects and contexts. The studies in this book introduce the new research field "digital human sciences," which include the humanities, the social sciences, and law. From their different disciplinary outlooks, the authors share the aim of discussing and developing methods and approaches for investigating digital society, digital culture, and digital media objects.

Author: Johan Heilbron
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319732994
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 381

View

Book Description
This volume employs new empirical data to examine the internationalization of the social sciences and humanities (SSH). While the globalization dynamics that have transformed the shape of the world over the last decades has been the subject of a growing number of scientific studies, very few such studies have set out to analyze the globalization of social and human sciences themselves. Arguing against the complacent assumption that Science is ‘international by nature’, this work demonstrates that the growing circulation of scholars and scientific ideas is a complex, contradictory and contested process. Arranged thematically, the chapters in this volume present a coherent exploration of patterns of transnationalization, South-North and East-West exchanges, and transnational regionalization. Further, they offer fresh insight into specific topics including the influence of the Anglo-American research infrastructure and the development of social and human sciences in postcolonial contexts. Featuring contributions from leading international scholars in the field, this work will advance the research agenda and will have interdisciplinary appeal for scholars from across the social sciences.

Author: Christopher Fox
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520916220
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

View

Book Description
The human sciences—including psychology, anthropology, and social theory—are widely held to have been born during the eighteenth century. This first full-length, English-language study of the Enlightenment sciences of humans explores the sources, context, and effects of this major intellectual development. The book argues that the most fundamental inspiration for the Enlightenment was the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Natural philosophers from Copernicus to Newton had created a magisterial science of nature based on the realization that the physical world operated according to orderly, discoverable laws. Eighteenth-century thinkers sought to cap this achievement with a science of human nature. Belief in the existence of laws governing human will and emotion; social change; and politics, economics, and medicine suffused the writings of such disparate figures as Hume, Kant, and Adam Smith and formed the basis of the new sciences. A work of remarkable cross-disciplinary scholarship, this volume illuminates the origins of the human sciences and offers a new view of the Enlightenment that highlights the period's subtle social theory, awareness of ambiguity, and sympathy for historical and cultural difference.

Author: Michael Bell
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761955306
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

View

Book Description
Bakhtin and the Human Sciences demonstrates the abundance of ideas Bakhtin's thought offers to the human sciences, and reconsiders him as a social thinker, not just a literary theorist. The contributors hail from many disciplines and their essays' implications extend into other fields in the human sciences. The volume emphasizes Bakhtin's work on dialogue, carnival, ethics and everyday life, as well as the relationship between Bakhtin's ideas and those of other important social theorists. In a lively introduction Gardiner and Bell discuss Bakhtin's significance as a major intellectual figure and situate his ideas within current trends and developments in social theory.