Proposals Regarding Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Inquiries into Humanism

Abstract

When we set out to carry out research in the field of the humanities and social sciences, we are actualizing—even if we are not always aware of it—the question of the human being; that is, the question that constitutes the core of humanism, on whose answer the development of scientific knowledge has depended from modernity to the present day.

The word humanism refers to a cultural tradition rooted in the European Renaissance. It implies certain cultural and pedagogical experiences and presupposes a particular organization and institutionalization of knowledge and practices which, while revealing some aspects of reality, at the same time conceal others. We propose to dismantle some still-current assumptions of humanism from a critical Our-American perspective.

On the one hand, we appeal to the notion of the “imaginary” as both a condition of possibility and a creative power of the human being (Castoriadis, 1993). On the other hand, we draw on the notions of “diversity”—as the privileging of a logic that favors space and the concrete richness of the contents of knowledge—and the constitutive “historicity” of the human being—as a normative criterion for the realization of human capacities and possibilities (Ellacuría, 1992).

We maintain that it is possible to trace, within our tradition of thought, an alternative form of humanism that may be characterized in intercultural terms.