In seven essays, this book offers a tour de force through those seven disciplines in the humanities that lately underwent a fundamental transformation. In order to apply “exact” scientific methods, these disciplines turned away from their very subjects— the understanding of the relationship or a dialogue that underlies the phenomena they are supposed to investigate. The revisionist approach in this book, based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s work, traces the search for common and specific grounds of the humanities, beginning with psychologism through hermeneutics and semiotics up to the present state of self-annihilation. As an alternative, the book seeks to define humanities as the examination of relationships, which offers an array of refreshing perspectives on each field discussed.
