Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper is inspired by the Bakhtinian fragment, “Towards the Philosophical Foundations of the Human Sciences”, the provisional title for a large-scale project which was probably begun and abandoned in the late 1930s. Drawing on and extrapolating Bakhtin’s insights, the paper addresses the traditional disciplinary divisions, generated by the “Cartesian anxiety” (as dubbed by Taylor), that led to substantive, methodological, and hierarchical distinctions between the study of “the spirit” as the domain of the humanities, and the study of “matter”, subsuming various forms of human behavior and organization. In response to the current crisis of the humanities that calls for a re-thinking of these disciplinary divisions, the paper offers an alternative Bakhtinian conceptualization, encompassing both the traditional humanities with their predominantly textual orientation and the social and behavioral sciences inasmuch as their subject matter is human subjectivity. The proposed conceptualization, a follow-up of my previous work, Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject (Stanford University Press, 2014), is predicated on four foundational premises that relate both to the subject matter and the mode of research in the human sciences: “interpreting interpretations”; “immanent reflexivity”; “textuality/dialogicity”, and “immanent transcendence”.