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The Unity of the Social Sciences?

Date limite de candidature : vendredi 15 janvier 2015

The Unity of the Social Sciences?

Summer School EHESS 2016 - Du 20 juin au 1er juillet 2016

Hyper-specialization characterizes most, or all fields of academic studies. Medicine, history, economics or anthropology, are divided in internal subfields, often compartmentalized from each other and bearing little connection to the mother discipline. This hyper-specialization helped the development of all sciences, including the Social Sciences, but is often unsuitable to account for the complexity and scale of social processes. Culture, economics, politics, sexuality, the family, and technology shape each other in ways that demands a sobering return to broad scholarship and synthetic analysis and the capacity to move from economic models to historical narrative, from thick ethnography to global processes, from statistical analyses to hermeneutic understanding of everyday practices.

To find an inspiration for such model of scholarship, we need to look no further than at Adam Smith, Max Weber, Pareto, or Durkheim, all trained in philosophy, economics, history, political science, the study of religion, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. In order to make sense of the momentous changes undergone by their respective society, these thinkers borrowed freely from various disciplines and practiced Interdisciplinarity before the name was invented.

In the landscape of world academia, the EHESS has long stood out for the interdisciplinary character of its pedagogical and research program. This interdisciplinary tradition explains its sustained and steady flow of outstanding scholars such as Lucien Febvre, Claude Levi-Strauss, Fernand Braudel, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Germaine Tillon (to quote only a few names). No other academic institution in the world has implemented more systematically the deliberate encounter of the Social and Human sciences in its teaching curriculum, most notably but not only: sociology with history, philosophy and literature, history and economics, philosophy and cognitive sciences, anthropology and sociology.

Because of this rich and unique intellectual tradition, the EHESS offers a Summer Program around the topic of The Unity of the Social Sciences through 4 intensive courses.

Lieu :
EHESS - Salle 8
Adresse :
105, boulevard Raspail - 75006 Paris

Document annexe