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The European Research Council (ERC) funding scheme classifies law within the social sciences and humanities sector, identifying legal science as a social science. The paper presents the case-study of such a classification as a deterministic model of evaluation and assessment of legal research. This may impact on career opportunities of individuals as well as on scientific independence, tacitly predefining the selection of research topics and legal methodology. The paper argues that ERC encourages a successful trend of conducting legal research to obtain funding, through the application of indicators. Their aim is to show which process has been followed to achieve and measure results. Legal science then risks being reduced to the analysis of legal performance. In this context, re-reading some writings of Polanyi on social sciences as well as on the critique of economic determinism sheds light on forms of academic determinism that affect the way of carrying-out research.

The reflections brought about in the present paper are developed along a renewed dialogue between psychoanalysis and the human sciences, in particular with semiotics understood as the science of signification, a science, according to the definition that Saussure gave in the early twentieth century, "that studies the life of signs within the framework of social life." The specific object of our reflection is understanding whether and how the mentalization abilities of modern humans have changed along with modern digital media. If what MacIver observed about "anomie" is true, namely, that anomic man "lives on the fragile thread of immediate sensations that have no past as well as no future," the specific structure of social media seems to determine psychosocial processes characterized by the flattening of an existential perspective dimension. Social media, in fact, is marked by a linear dimension, referred to by linguists as syntagmatic, and an extreme redundancy of the other fundamental dimension of language, namely the paradigmatic one. This linguistic and, in our opinion, also deeply psychological imbalance toward a horizontal superficiality "without past and without future" actually configures, in clinical experience, a contiguous-autistic dimension. Psychotherapeutic work then aims more than ever at recovering the capacity for a processual journey, session after session, in order to rebuild a vital "psycho-semio-narrative" capacity. Remembering in order to invent, then, and a "memory of the future" such that the relationship between narrative and Origins is not so much and not only the "narrative of origins," but storytelling as a deeply mental and dreamlike tool to originate a future never before imagined.

This paper presents the results of a study focused on the analysis of student texts in three disciplines from the humanities. The aim of the study was to determine, from a systemic functional standpoint and through a transitivity analysis of process types (HALLIDAY, 1994), how different fields of knowledge and experience are construed in student texts. In the analysis, we considered 80 texts written by undergraduate students of literature, history and geography. The texts belong to four different genres: essay, question-answer, review and report and were all written in Spanish. The methodology included a quantitative and qualitative analysis of process type realizations of each text, followed by a comparative analysis between the disciplines and between the genres considered in each one. The results showed both the similarities that unite these disciplines as part of the humanities area and the differences that reflect their specific fields of knowledge and construction of meanings.

This paper discusses the possible significations of a so-called anthropological turn in the field of the Humanities and Arts. The text focuses on the meaning of Anthropology and its application in these fields. In this sense, two great conceptions of Anthropology are distinguished: an understanding of Anthropology as an attempt at a singular, meta-historical and transcultural determination of a valid definition of what it means to be human; and another whose use predominates in the Anglo-American contemporary context, in which different ways of being human are considered, instead of a single conception. The text also discusses the word ‘reviravolta’ [overturn] which the Humanities and the Arts have been trying to point out and identify as what is or should be the contemporary thought in those fields.

This paper discusses the possible significations of a so-called anthropological turn in the field of the Humanities and Arts. The text focuses on the meaning of Anthropology and its application in these fields. In this sense, two great conceptions of Anthropology are distinguished: an understanding of Anthropology as an attempt at a singular, meta-historical and transcultural determination of a valid definition of what it means to be human; and another whose use predominates in the Anglo-American contemporary context, in which different ways of being human are considered, instead of a single conception. The text also discusses the word ‘reviravolta’ [overturn] which the Humanities and the Arts have been trying to point out and identify as what is or should be the contemporary thought in those fields.