The George Washington University Seminar in the Human Sciences

The aim of this Seminar is to bring together scholars working on theoretical issues in the various domains of the human sciences. By "theoretical" work is meant the elaboration of structures of explanations, interpretations, commentary, comparison and criticism which make the objects of those sciences accessible and intelligible (or more so than formerly), and provide a framework for argument about judgments of their value.

The "human sciences" are taken to include all those disciplines that deal with the meanings, rather than merely with the properties, behavior, origins, etc., of things and events. By far the largest and most ramified class of objects of the human sciences as so defined consists of texts, and much of the recent innovative work in this domain--narratology, the semiotics of literature, reception theory, deconstruction, and so on--deals with texts. But that is only part of what the Seminar intends to cover; on the one hand there are textual domains outside literary theory (critical legal theory, for example, or discourse analysis in areas like politics, history, communication, business, medicine, etc.) and on the other there are substantive issues involving meanings in the contexts other than the textual (feminism, the arts including architecture, theatre, and film, artificial intelligence and the neurosciences, and--especially in relation to questions of moral value--management, the military, and again, medicine).

The membership of the Seminar is therefore extremely diverse. Its task is to find a common focus of concern, a body of work that may be of common interest, and a spectrum of methods that might be shared to mutual advantage.