Radical Reflection and the Origin of Human Sciences

Calvin O. Schrag is the George Ade Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus of Purdue University. A graduate of Yale and Harvard, a Fulbright Scholar at Heidelberg and Oxford Universities, a Guggenheim Fellow at the University of Freiburg, and a co-founder of the international philosophical quarterly Continental Philosophy Review. He is the author of nine books, of which the most recently published are The Self After Postmodernity (1999), God as Otherwise Than Being: Toward a Semantics of the Gift (2002), and Convergence Amidst Difference: Philosophical Conversations Across National Boundaries (2004).

Even while developing his own jargon-free argument, Schrag clearly presents the history of philosophical anthropology and methodological difficulties of social science. The book is useful on many levels and indispensable for serious students and scholars of social science and philosophy. Simply put, Schrag has set the standard and pace of philosophical and scientific approaches to mankind. Every library with upper-level undergraduate and graduate students must have this book, and every serious student and scholar should read it - at least twice."-Choice "By illustrating that reflection is the work of community and inter-subjectivity and individual as one, by expanding knowledge and reason such that they voice the variegated significations of world-comprehension interms of equiprimordial tissues of mythos, poesis and techne, Schrag has presented us with a powerful prolegomenon to the human sciences. For those who call themselves 'human scientists,' this is an essential, state-of-the-art text."The Humanistic Psychologist