Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The great technological achievements of natural science bring to see empirical method as the only scientific method and causes human sciences to adopt this view. Yet, since this method fits the material objects of natural sciences it de-humanizes human reality and thus blazes the way for materializing human existence. From this perspective, humanities are not a science at all or mostly a very weak science. The paper claims that only a resistance to this tendency could rehabilitate the humanities. The resistance should emphasize the essential difference between investigating a meaningless being, the material world, and a being of meaning, the human spirit and its products. By emphasizing this difference, one can explains why the humanities are a different science and not a weak science; a science which could not and should not be based on empirical method but on interpretation and human understanding. The paper uses Husserl’s phenomenology and Gadamer’s hermeneutics for advancing its claim. Husserl explains the failure of positivist sciences to distinguish between method and reality and thus opens the way to existential reflection on the significance of what he names “lifeworld” (Weltleben). Gadamer explains why truth is a result of understanding or interpretation and not of a method for pointing on the educational role of the humanities. Both Husserl and Gadamer argue that what is at stake is not only epistemological question but, and more importantly, an ethical issue. Actually, they bring us back to the fundamental question of the humanities: What is a human being or what is a flourishing human existence (Eudaimonia)?