Understanding Human Life: A Methodological and Interdisciplinary Approach: 19 (Methodos Series, 19) - Tapa dura

Acerca del autor

Courgeau Daniel is Director of Research Emeritus at the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED). From twenty years his research interests are mainly focussed on the methodology and epistemology of social science. He has published three books on this theme and many other papers and book chapters in journals and books.

De la contraportada

This book addresses the challenge of understanding human life. It compares our life experience with the attempts to grasp it by astrologers, eugenicists, psychologists, neuroscientists, social scientists, and philosophers. The main opposition among these specialties lies between understanding and misunderstanding. The book also addresses the central methodological difficulty of capturing a human life.

Next, the book looks at the ways of capturing an imaginary or real human life story. A comprehensive approach will try to fully understand their complexity, while a more explanatory approach considers only certain specific phenomena of human life. For example, demography studies only births, deaths, and migration. Another crucial factor in the collection of life histories is memory and its transmission. Psychology and psychoanalysis have developed different schools to try to explain them.

The book concludes with a detailed discussion of the concepts and tools that have been proposed in more recent times for understanding the various aspects of life stories: mechanisms, systems, hermeneutics, and autonomy.