Radical Reflection and the Origin of Human Sciences

In this work, Calvin O. Schrag addresses a widespread crisis in the current philosophies and sciences of man. He sees this crisis as resulting from a loss of center within the human sciences. Accelerated developments in the human sciences have produced such a proliferation of portraits and models of man that the common center of concern from which they allegedly proceed is no longer recognizable.The common center of concern that motivated these multiple inquiries, the passion to understand the human world in its multidimensional expression, has been displaced by parochial methodological and metaphysical constructs. The books central thesis is that the path to a concrete understanding of the being and behavior of man in his everyday life-world must first of all be cleared through an exercise of a radical reflection that at the same time deconstructs the residual metaphysics in contemporary philosophies of man and the abstract empiricism of current social science.