As the first book to analyze the work of Fanon as an existential-phenomenological of human sciences and liberation philosopher, Gordon deploys Fanon's work to illuminate how the "bad faith" of European science and civilization have philosophically stymied the project of liberation. Fanon's body of work serves as a critique of European science and society, and shows the ways in which the project of "truth" is compromised by Eurocentric artificially narrowed scope of humanity--a circumstance to which he refers as the crisis of European Man. In his examination of the roots of this crisis, Gordon explores the problems of historical salvation and the dynamics of oppression, the motivation behind contemporary European obstruction of the advancement of a racially just world, the forms of anonymity that pervade racist theorizing and contribute to "seen invisibility," and the reasons behind the impossibility of a nonviolent transition from colonialism and neocolonialism to postcolonialism.

Centralization and over-professionalization can lead to the disappearance of a critical environment capable of linking the human sciences to the “real world.” The authors of this volume suggest that the humanities need to operate in a concrete cultural environment able to influence procedures on a hic et nunc basis, and that they should not entirely depend on normative criteria whose function is often to hide ignorance behind a pretentious veil of value-neutral objectivity. In sociology, the growth of scientism has fragmented ethical categories and distorted discourse between our inner and outer selves, while philosophy is suffering from an empty professionalism current in many philosophy departments in industrialized and developing countries where boring, ahistorical, and nonpolitical exercises are justified through appeals to false excellence. In all branches of the humanities, absurd evaluation processes foster similar tendencies as they create a sterile atmosphere and prevent interdisciplinarity and creativity. Technicization of theory plays into the hands of technocrats. The authors offer a broad range of approaches and interpretations, reaching from philosophy of education to the re-evaluation of business models for universities.

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.

First published in 2004. This study begins by surveying the field of modern hermeneutics. Noting its repeated crisis of self-legitimisation, it traces these to circular beliefs bequeathed by Romanticism that human nature is self-begetting, and can thus be known intimately and autonomously. After providing a historical overview of how human nature had been understood, the focus shifts to the attack in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria on Wordsworth’s 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and to a reading of some key Romantic texts. It reads Coleridge’s famous definition of the imagination as an attack on Romantic hermeneuticsm, roots in the traditional view that man has been created in Imago Dei. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

The Crisis of the European Sciences is Husserl's last and most influential book, written in Nazi Germany where he was discriminated against as a Jew. It incisively identifies the urgent moral and existential crises of the age and defends the relevance of philosophy at a time of both scientific progress and political barbarism. It is also a response to Heidegger, offering Husserl's own approach to the problems of human finitude, history and culture. The Crisis introduces Husserl's influential notion of the 'life-world' – the pre-given, familiar environment that includes both 'nature' and 'culture' – and offers the best introduction to his phenomenology as both method and philosophy. Dermot Moran's rich and accessible introduction to the Crisis explains its intellectual and political context, its philosophical motivations and the themes that characterize it. His book will be invaluable for students and scholars of Husserl's work and of phenomenology in general.

This book provides the first sustained attempt to extract from Kant's writings on biology, anthropology and history an account of the human sciences, their underlying unity, their presuppositions as well as their methodology; that is to say, Kant's philosophical and epistemological foundation of the human sciences.

The Creativity Crisis excavates the root causes of America's innovation slow-down, showing why revolutionary insights are no longer chased by young talent. Economically and socially, caution has overtaken creation. This book is ultimately a roadmap for reinvigorating innovation within the system of science.

"Provides a critical and historical introduction to the core themes and influential thinkers that helped to shape contemporary human science approaches to psychotherapy"--Provided by publisher.

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.

This book is a collection of essays on Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences by leading philosophers of science and scholars of Husserl. Published and ignored under the Nazi dictatorship, Husserl's last work has never received the attention its author's prominence demands. In the Crisis, Husserl considers the gap that has grown between the "life-world" of everyday human experience and the world of mathematical science. He argues that the two have become disconnected because we misunderstand our own scientific past—we confuse mathematical idealities with concrete reality and thereby undermine the validity of our immediate experience. The philosopher's foundational work in the theory of intentionality is relevant to contemporary discussions of qualia, naive science, and the fact-value distinction. The scholars included in this volume consider Husserl's diagnosis of this "crisis" and his proposed solution. Topics addressed include Husserl's late philosophy, the relation between scientific and everyday objects and "worlds," the history of Greek and Galilean science, the philosophy of history, and Husserl's influence on Foucault.