An Agenda-Setting History

Following the survey of the book and the main historical stages of the history of the human sciences in the modern university outlined in the preface and the introduction, the chapter articulates the main analytical, methodological, epistemological or ontological tenets that this alternative history builds upon. In keeping with the driving ambition to write a new history that highlights their productive character and influence, the study follows the trace of agenda-setting major contributions to the human sciences. In continuation hereof, the study understands the epistemic tradition of the human sciences as established through an ongoing and open-ended series of prescriptive and normative events permeated by a virtuality that constantly gives rise to dispositions that previously did not exist. The approach applied also implies that the study understands and articulates cognation and knowledge as activities that have decisive normative and performative effects. As articulated in this study, the ongoing productive crisis of the human sciences is to be perceived as an enduring and unending transcending and norm-setting undertaking resulting in the establishment of new, irreducible modes of science and conceptions of scientificity that continuously create and vindicate new conditions of assertability for knowledge. To depict this continuing establishment of new modes of science and scientificity, the study takes the form of a transversal investigation that aims to trace the transcending and norm-setting cognitive activity as it moves across borders, where the baton is picked up from previous inventive activity and passed on to the next generation. The study of cognition and knowledge as normating activities presented here differs decisively from more traditional and well-established accounts of the history and contributions of the human sciences, in particular those that portray them either as containing an inherited value in themselves or as a primarily problem-solving cognitive activity. In this manner, the study depicts the tradition of the human sciences as a precious heritage that is not preceded by any kind of testament and is thus in need of constant reinterpretation. To be able to follow and cover the normative, unveiling and agenda-setting movement fraught with consequences in its full breadth and complexity, the study adheres to a wide and inclusive understanding of the human sciences as the sciences that distinguish themselves by researching and producing knowledge concerning human affairs. By contrast, the study also uses the nomination ‘humanities’ to designate a demarcation that is more exclusive and narrow in scope in so far as it refers to the parts of the human sciences that are devoted to studying and cultivating the particularly, specifically and emphatically human.