How should we understand research in the humanities in the light of our knowledge of human beings.

What is it about?

Hermeneutics has for a long time been the central philosophical approach informing the study of the humanities. This has, however, in the eyes of some, isolated the study of humanities from the study of nature. My primary claim is that the commonly perceived divorce between the natural sciences and humanities rests on faulty theories of both scientific methodology and the nature of explanation and interpretation as defended by prior schools of philosophy such as hermeneutics. In this paper I argue that it is time to reconsider the humanities and to base research in the humanities on a philosophical approach that rests its claims on naturalized and pragmatic considerations. Such a naturalistic view reflects not only the practice of this research better than hermeneutics, but brings the aims of scientific study of cultural phenomena in closer contact with the aims we find in the scientific study of natural phenomena.

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Why is it important?

It is an attempt to show how our understanding of the humanities can be naturalized like our understanding of the natural sciences.