EDITORIAL
During
the first decade or so of its existence, the journal Human
Affairs has primarily served the purpose of presenting in English
translation the
works of Slovak scholars from a wide range of areas in the
humanities and social sciences to make these works available to our
international colleagues and thus to show a picture of current
scholarly thinking
and research on “human affairs” in this country.
Many valuable papers and articles from philosophy, psychology,
sociology and other disciplines have been published including those from
history and ethnology which have provided
competent
information about past and present events and realities in
Slovakia. In addition to
these publications, several papers written by invited foreign
scholars have also appeared in our journal. Readers may gather basic
information about the content of volumes published between
1990 and 2001 from abstracts available on our website www.humanaffairs.sk.
(Some volumes to be completed yet.) We are also working on
the idea of
publishing a special “representative“ volume (either in a
standard paper form or an electronic one), which would include a
selection of the most interesting papers published in our journal in the
past decade.
However,
the time for another change has come. The original mission of the
journal has been fulfilled and
should now be renewed and enlarged. A new editorial board has
been created, new sponsors involved, new ideas and projects scrutinized.
We shall briefly outline below a vision of what type of journal we
imagine producing within the next decade.
The
internal and external contexts of work in the humanities and social
sciences in Slovakia have changed
to the extent that we now
feel prepared to become a part of international community of
scientific workers in these fields. We feel the need to create the
possibility for
an international scholarly dialogue on “human affairs” in the
widest possible sense and provide a
forum for the widest exchange of ideas, theories, research
results etc. in our journal, regardless of nationality, country of
origin, race or sex orientation. Moreover, the framework of Human
Affairs has always been interdisciplinary and/or multidisciplinary.
Now we wish to move even further and to label our efforts as “postdisciplinary”.
What does this mean?
Of course, not the reduction or devaluation of standard scholarly
and scientific criteria for publications, such as peer review,
originality of
papers, etc. However, the conception of science and research
itself is currently in
transition and we wish our journal to be not only competent but
also widely read and influential. We think that rather than being bound
to one particular academic discipline the issues we deal with in the
contemporary world in humanities and social sciences are complex ,
demanding unrestricted, creative and open multi-faceted approaches. Thus
the term “postdisciplinarity“” means that Human
Affairs is not a journal of any one specific discipline within the
humanities and social sciences or of any special school of thought or a
paradigm within them. But rather the journal
is open to all traditional disciplines which do not focus
exclusively on discipline’s specific issues. Postdisciplinarity in our
understanding does not mean that the traditional disciplines have
disappeared or indeed should disappear, but rather that they are
changing and should change in order to solve complex issues of human
affairs. It is not sufficient to approach such complex issues from any
single discipline.
We wish to create a space for such contributions in our journal,
which may not be considered ‘appropriate’ in any traditional journal
of philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, etc. Thus the specific
discipline that authors come from will not be important; what will be
important is that all authors contribute to the solution of a particular
human problem. We invite all nontraditional, innovative, complex and
postdisciplinary contributions without any restriction to any discipline
(but, of course, we shall look out for and exclude any sort of
charlatanism and obscurantism).
There
are many issues of “human affairs” in the contemporary world which
we would like to devote space to in the journal in order to encourage
reflection and inquiry. There
are the “big questions” and crucial problems such as the
quality of life, the meaning of life, issues of cultural identity,
sexuality, poverty, communication, gender, cooperation, peace, values,
love, friendship, media, technology, humanism, human settlements,
globalization, environment, the human genome, evolution, human nature,
human action, tradition, freedom, equality, justice, criticism, poetry,
literature, postmodernism, science, death and dying, terrorism, etc. We
would
like to encourage and welcome innovative contributions that
either do not belong
strictly to any of the traditional discipline in the humanities
and social sciences, or that consciously and coherently combine facts,
ideas and knowledge from several fields.
We plan to dedicate each issue of Human
Affairs starting from 2003 to one of the “big issues” and to
invite international scholars to contribute to its exploration and
analysis as well as to possible solutions and understandings. Thus each
issue would become a “forum” and a small “monograph” providing
readers with a perspective on a specific human affair as seen by
contemporary scholars from various fields of the humanities and social
sciences.
We are well aware of the ambitious nature of our project but we are sure that it is a worthwhile endeavour.
Emil
Višňovský, Editor-in-Chief
Gabriel Bianchi, Associate Editor