The philosophy behind the approach of the Institute is best conceived of as Humanism, by analogy to the Humanism which emerged in the late Middle Ages in Europe as a belief in the importance of “humane letters”, such as language, literature, history, philosophy, etc. as against “Divine letters”.

In the case of the Institute, Humanism is understood as insistence on the importance of humanity as a reality sui generis as against physical and biological realities. The approach we advocate can thus be referred to as humanistics. This approach is different from the approaches characteristic of contemporary social sciences both in its focus and in its method. What distinguishes humanity from the rest of the animal species is culture, i.e. the fact that the process through which human beings transmit their ways of life across generations and distances is essentially symbolic and not, as in other animal species, essentially genetic. Therefore, our focus is on culture.

The study of symbolic reality necessitates an appropriate method, by definition different from methods appropriate for biological or physical realities, accepted in the social sciences as the only methods deserving the name of “scientific”. This approach is also different from the approaches characteristic of the humanities in that it is indeed a scientific approach, i.e. its theories are not speculative but in every case refutable by the test of empirical evidence.

UNI Conference 2001

Proceedings of The Earhart Foundation Conference on the State of the Social Sciences (Boston University, December 6-7, 2002), published in the Critical Review, Fall 2004.