The Knowledge of Humanities

Are humanities scientific disciplines? This book offers compelling arguments for reopening the issue of the relations between humanities and natural sciences. It criticizes the current trend of defending humanities on the basis of their expected social or economic impact, in terms of cultural heritage, wellness, mass culture or democratic habits. The book vigorously calls for a new epistemological reflection, which addresses the issues left open by the XX century: Do humanities produce valid knowledge or just culture and informed opinion? How do researchers in humanities advance explanations and causal statements? How do they build up the proofs for their statements, given that they deal with objects and events buried in the past? Do we have science for individual cases? The author suggests a novel approach, based on the comparative analysis of various disciplines in humanities. They deal with historiography in the first place and with the main historical objects of investigation: the text (literary criticism), the image (history of art), the building (history of architecture). The book dives deep into some of the most authoritative works of researchers of the XX century in these fields, reading them from the perspective of epistemology. It then identifies a number of scientific principles and procedures that meet the highest requirements for reliability and validity. Recent epistemological developments in theories of causality, nature of scientific laws, and history-dependent natural sciences suggest that a new type of dialogue between humanities and hard sciences is possible. A dialogue between peers.