The inter-institutional research cluster entitled Integrative Humanities and its proposed activities are premised on the conviction that several fundamental questions in the humanities whose answers otherwise appear elusive can be, at least tentatively, answered through heterodox yet integrated reasoning that cuts across disciplines (philosophy, literature, psychology, and intellectual history being the most pertinent here). In the long run, through its engagement with meta-questions in the humanities, the cluster seeks to offer clarifications on the validity criteria of knowledge in the domain of studia humanitatis. Though substantially different from hard sciences in orientation and methodology, can the humanities ever hope to achieve a grasp over the world of human experience comparable to that which the former have over the natural/physical world?

The cluster plans to undertake three advanced research projects consecutively. The first, “Was the World Ever ‘Enchanted’?: A Meta-Inquiry into the Ontology of Religious Ideas,” aims to break new ground in understanding the implicit ontology of religious ideas and associated conceptualizations of the world, with primary focus on Judeo-Christianity and its Ancient Near Eastern and Greek precursors but extensible to or contrastable with Indian religions, in a novel framework centered on a non-reductive singularity paradigm of religion. The second, “Sources of Imaginative Enchantment: Towards a Theory of Subliminal Affect in Literary Art,” endeavours to develop an exploratory schema within which it should be possible to delineate the complexity of what, after all, draws humanity to literary creations (a world appetite or penchant for the singular?). With its fairly comprehensive engagements across the spectrum of existence ranging from childhood and parenting to dying (e.g., Elisabeth Kübler-Ross) and transcendence, and possibilities of cross-fertilization between academic knowledge and everyday experience, the humanities have almost become, as it were, a quasi-religion. The third project, “Instauratio de Studibus Humanitatis” [Renewal of the Humanities], seeks to create a blueprint for holistic humanities.