Methodos project
Project
The scholarly journal Methodos: Savoirs et Textes is an annual journal with a review board and a resolutely interdisciplinary perspective, first published in January 2001.
It was born from the encounters of historians of science, philosophers and philologists brought together in what was then the CNRS-dependent Joint Research Unit “Savoirs et textes” (UMR 8519, directed by Fabienne Blaise; associate director Pierre Cassou-Noguès) at the Universities of Lille 3 and Lille 1.After January 2006, this UMR joined with linguists from the UMR SILEX and philosophers from the Eric Weil Centre to form the UMR 8163 “Savoirs, Textes, Langage”. Methodos therefore remains open to the different disciplines represented in this research laboratory (i.e., classical philology, history of science and philosophy), provided that proposed studies proceed from textual work.
This openness is not conceived as presenting, by mere juxtaposition, the results attained in different disciplines, mentioned with regard to the texts they inhabit. Rather, Methodos aims to promote what provides interdisciplinarity its true benefit: that enrichment which can bring to the common discussion—as well as the particular disciplines—the diverse experiences of research in these disciplines insofar as they reflect on their own practice. For the purely formal unity that characterizes disciplinary journals, Methodos aims to substitute that true intellectual community which interdisciplinarity can establish when its actors accompany their textual work (i.e., the work of deciphering and meticulous reading) with a reflection on the operations it implies, with a study of the history of these operations, and with the examination of the validity of the theoretical models deployed for the understanding of these texts.
The journal thus aims to relativize the traditional opposition between literary and scientific cultures—between the acts of understanding and explaining—in order to focus, if not on the ensemble of problems, at least on their mutual instruction. Attention will be focused on the method, on the procedures by which one arrives at a given knowledge. In their specificity, presented articles will each time raise a problematic aspect concerning method, the issues underlying proposed results, and placing the larger interpretative categories employed into perspective.
Methodos therefore presents articles that bring to the fore reflection on the concrete operations of the mind, the productions of which (knowledge, texts) it considers to be en route. This attention to methods, to the “how-to” of each discipline, as well as to the theoretical stakes of the interpretations of texts, allows us to find a common aim across the diversity of fields and to ask the fundamental questions of a diversified but not scattered rationality.
The journal will therefore favour articles that fall under the following three headings:
1. the literal reading and interpretation of texts (literary, philosophical and scientific, in Greek, Latin, Arabic, etc.);
2. the history of the modes in which these texts were read and understood, and theories of interpretation;
3. epistemological reflection on research procedures and operations.
Target Readership
The primary target audience is of course researchers and teacher-researchers, both French and international, whose work concerns philology, philosophy, or the history of science. However, the reflective character of the journal, and its interest in questions of epistemology and interpretation, allows for a widening of the audience to include other text specialists (e.g., linguists) and scholars concerned with the history of their discipline and the procedures by which it operates (e.g., mathematicians).
Publication and Distribution
The Presses Universitaires du Septentrion assumed publication and distribution of the first three issues. From no. 4 onward, the journal has been published exclusively online via the Revues.org / OpenEdition Journal portal.