1st Edition
The Routledge International Handbook of Existential Human Science
This volume is the first handbook to explore existentialism as epistemology and method. Transdisciplinary in scope, it considers the nature of human subjectivity and how human experience ought to be studied, examining the connections that exist between the individual’s imagining of the world and their everyday practice within it.
With attention to the question of whether humans are ultimately alone in their self-knowledge or whether what they know of themselves is constructed in common with others, it enables the reader to recognize core questions that frame the methods and orientation of an existential inquiry. In addition to historical exposition, it offers a variety of chapters from around the world that explore the diverse global spaces for, and different types of, existential focus and discussion, thus questioning the view that the existential "problem" may be singularly a matter for the post-enlightenment West.
The fullest and most comprehensive survey to date of what human beings can and should make of themselves, The Routledge International Handbook of Existential Human Science will appeal to scholars across the humanities and social sciences with interests in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and research methods.
1. General Introduction: The Routledge Handbook of Existential Human Science
Huon Wardle, Albert Piette, Nigel Rapport
Section 1. The Existential Perspective Across the Disciplines
2. Introduction
Huon Wardle
3. Existential Sociology
Joseph Kotarba and Andrii Melnikov
4. Existential Psychology
Daniel Sullivan, Alexis Goad, and Harrison J. Schmitt
5. Anthropology as an Existential Inquiry
Huon Wardle
6. Existential Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
Hel Spandler and Philip Thomas
7. Existentiality and Semiotics - are they compatible?
Eero Tarasti
8. A Contested Legacy: Kant and Existentialism
Pablo Muchnik and Lawrence Pasternack
Section 2. Interiority, Selfhood and Integrity: The Individual as regards the Social
9. Section II: Introduction
Nigel Rapport
10. Unsociable Sociability
Ronald Stade
11. Internal Conversation: Interiority and Individuality
Nigel Rapport
12. Relational, but also Singular: On the Varieties and Particularities of Selfscapes
Douglas Hollan
13. The Ballad (or Fugue) of William Cullum: Disciplining the Body of Prisoner 55552-052
William Cullum and Andrew Irving
14. The Car Driver’s Being: A Different Direction to the Auto-Ontological Turn
Andrew Dawson
15. Existentialism and Tango Social Dance: The Anthropology of (Moving) Events
Jonathan Skinner
Section 3. Intersubjectivity: Care for and Faith in the Other
16. Section III: Introduction
Huon Wardle
17. Existential Care Ethics
Rasmus Dyring
18. Faith and the Existential
Devaka Premawardhana
19. Existence Against Being
Jean-Michel Salanskis
20. (In)Dividual Lives and Existential Narratives
Samuele Poletti
21. Existential Finitude in Indian Buddhist Philosophy
Roshni Patel
22. Exploring the Relationship Between Language and Empathy: Some Unexpected Connections
Stéphanie Walsh Matthews and Dana Osborne
Section 4. Singularity and Continuity
23. Section IV: Introduction
Albert Piette
24. The Loss of Singular Existence and Personal Experience: The Problem of Interchangeability in the Social Sciences
Marine Kneubühler
25. Sartrean Existentialism and Existential Art
Catherine Beaugrand
26. Volumology as Existential Anthropology
Albert Piette
27. An Empirical Approach to Studying Human Existence
Jan Patrick Heiss
28. Filming and Describing an Individual
Gwendoline Torterat
Biography
Huon Wardle is an Anthropologist at the University of St Andrews. Author of An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica (2000), he focuses on the Caribbean, Kant’s Anthropology, and on cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical phenomena. Volumes include (with Moises Lino e Silva) Freedom in Practice (2017), (with Justin Shaffner) Cosmopolitics (2017), and (with Nigel Rapport) An Anthropology of the Enlightenment (2018). His essay, "The Artist Carl Abrahams and the Cosmopolitan Work of Centring and Peripheralizing the Self" won the Royal Anthropological Institute’s J. B. Donne Prize in 2014. With Paloma Gay y Blasco, he recently revised How to Read Ethnography (2019).
Nigel Rapport, MA (Cambridge) PhD (Manchester), is Emeritus Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where he was Founding Director of the St Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He has also held the Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice at Concordia University of Montreal. He has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and of the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW). His research interests cover social theory, identity and individuality, community, conversation analysis, and links between anthropology and literature and philosophy. His recent books include: Anyone, the Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology (2012); Distortion and Love: An anthropological reading of the life and art of Stanley Spencer (2016); and Cosmopolitan Love: Ethical engagement beyond culture (2019).
Albert Piette is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Paris-Nanterre, researcher at the Centre for Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (CNRS). He has widely written about epistemology and methodology of anthropology. He claims a human-centered anthropology. His main books in French are Ethnographie de l’action (1996 and 2020), Le fait religieux (2005), Anthropologie existentiale (2009), Contre le relationnisme (2014), Le volume humain. Esquisse d’une science de l’homme (2017) and Anthropologie existentiale, autographie et entité humaine (2022). His books in English are Existence in the Details. Theory and Methodology in Existential Anthropology (2015), Separate Humans. Anthropology, Ontology, Existence (2016), Theoretical Anthropology or How to Observe a Human Being (2019). He has co-edited with Michael Jackson What is Existential Anthropology? (2015).
