Siegfried J. Schmidt Book order

This collection of papers published in the last forty years documents the author’s journey from philosophy of language to text theory and then to an empirical science of literature, ending with a concept of literary studies as a legitimate part of media culture studies. The main emphasis is placed on communication as a social system. The approach used in the book is strictly interdisciplinary in order to cope with the complexity of the different types of human communication, ranging from everyday talk to literary communication or advertising. Radical Constructivism provides the epistemological basis for this approach – a basis that has undergone important modifications in the course of the author’s development.

Siegfried J. Schmidt is closely associated in Germany with the cross-disciplinary research programme of Radical Constructivism. In Histories & Discourses he carries out a change of perspective from media and communication studies to studies of culture and the philosophy of language. His 'rewriting' of constructivism shows that classical constructivism shares some fundamental assumptions with realism, and he creates a new vocabulary which allows us to understand how we construct truth, identity, ethics, etc., without using any point of reference which lies beyond our culture (our ‘history and discourses’).