IEA

The Nantes IAS’s premise is that in the human sciences researcher and object are never wholly separable. Due to this particular epistemological status, comparative study and the other’s vision of our own culture and modes of thought are considered an indispensable ingredient of something like objectivity in our knowledge of the human being. On our own small scale, the Institute accordingly seeks to break with the unilateralism of enlightened North and benighted South to create the conditions for Northern and Southern researchers really to learn from each other, based on reciprocity.  

The epistemological premise of the Institute and its aim of encouraging a new type of intellectual encounter between academics from the North and the South is linked to another feature of the research policy of the Nantes IAS, namely that it privileges research into the dogmatic underpinnings of human societies, that is, into what in the meaning which a society assigns to human life lies beyond proof.

Neither man nor society would be able to maintain themselves without resorting to some founding beliefs that escape all attempts to experimental demonstration and sustain their manners and actions. This dogmatic dimension of human life is particularly seen at work in languages, law, religion and aesthetics, whose common feature is to establish meaning - meaning that exists per se and cannot be demonstrated. Rejecting the notion of dogma is characteristic of human sciences and derives from their own approach to dogma. As they postulate the possibility for man to become fully understandable to himself, they are led to equate reason with science and to uphold the scientistic lowering of man to the state of an entity that can be fully explained and perfectly managed. The scientific policy of the IEA aims at helping scientists from all continents to consider dogmatic systems from a totally different angle. Indeed, those systems should not be considered as the remains of a former, irrational age in a world doomed to becoming transparent and manageable but as a framework that is necessary to the establishment of reason in a world that is bound to remain diverse and unpredictable.