“The Human” between the “life-world” and its theoretical (re)construction

Résumé

The traditional split between rationality and historicity, concept and intuition, the form and content of knowledge has brought about an inappropriate approaching to humanities and social sciences. Presenting the main effects of such split, this paper aims at arguing the need to consider both the “empiric” and the “interpretive” as equally relevant for understanding our human world. It is eventually a meta-theoretical pleading for reconciling epistemology and ontology within a theory of humanities and social sciences able to avoid the two kinds of reductionism, foundationalist and textualist, related to traditional (empiricist) epistemology and respectively, to postmodernist hermeneutics.