The Human and Its Discourse: From Fragmentation to Unification
Vinicio Busacchi

Abstract
We are living in an era in which the differentiation of knowledge in the contemporary sciences has spurred a great increase in complexity. On one hand, this complexity is accompanied by specialisation and fragmentation; on the other hand, it fosters increased research of shared methods and vocabularies, and interdisciplinary approaches. The character and complexity of the different, intertwined series of challenges and the problematic connected to this discourse becomes particularly vivid if we consider the knot around the discourse of the human and the contemporary paradoxes related to the pre-eminent idea of what it means to become a person. Paul Ricoeur’s research offers a contemporary, comprehensive example of the complex interconnection of this dialectic. At the same time, it offers an example of a general model capable of being considered as a multilevel methodology for philosophy and the human and social sciences. This is critical hermeneutics: A theoreticalpractical and interdisciplinary procedure based on a transversal epistemology. In the end, the application of his philosophy and methodology to the concrete case of the contemporary human life will lead to reasoning with new complexities and paradoxes, revealing that, in the end, any comprehensive attempt to define the human being requires the support of a new, varied, and nourished humanism.

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