- Key People:
- Wilhelm Dilthey
- Charles Homer Haskins
- Related Topics:
- Historiography
- social science
- geography
- Humanism
- Art criticism
Humanities
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What are the humanities?
The humanities are branches of knowledge that explore human beings, their culture, and methods of critical inquiry that come from human values and the ability of the human spirit to express itself. As an educational discipline, the humanities differ in content and method from the physical, biological, and social sciences.
The humanities include the study of languages and literature, the arts, history, and philosophy. Contemporary ideas propose a complete educational program that propagates a self-sufficient system of human values. The humanities distinguish themselves from the social and physical sciences, but there is dispute as to whether the subject matter, or the methods of humanities, best accomplish this distinction.
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What does 'scholarship' mean in the context of the humanities?
In the humanities, "scholarship" refers to the learning, knowledge, and erudition characteristic of scholars in specialized fields of study. It involves critical and analytical methods of inquiry, appreciating human values, and understanding human culture.
Since the Renaissance, literary scholarship has played a crucial role in discovering, reviving, and making relevant the literary heritage of Greece and Rome. Scholarship enhances the intelligibility and coherence of artistic works, contributing to a deeper understanding of performance style and historical context.
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What academic disciplines are included in humanities scholarship?
Humanities scholarship encompasses disciplines that explore human culture, values, and expression through critical and analytical methods. These disciplines include languages, literature, the arts, history, and philosophy.
History, once intertwined with literature, regained prominence in the 18th century by incorporating political science and the philosophy of history. Literary scholarship has ancient roots, with early examples found in ancient civilizations. The Renaissance witnessed a revival of Greek and Roman literary heritage led by literary scholars. Anthropological linguistics studies the intricate relationship between language and culture, examining how language influences and is influenced by cultural contexts. Philosophy involves the rational, methodical, and systematic consideration of topics that are of greatest concern to humankind.
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How do scholars in the humanities conduct research?
Humanities scholars employ diverse methodologies in their research, focusing on human culture, values, and expression. Their research often involves critical analysis and interpretation of texts, artifacts, and historical sources.
Since the mid-20th century, humanities scholarship has expanded through interdisciplinary approaches, incorporating insights from archaeology, linguistics, literary theory, anthropology, and sociology. This interdisciplinary approach enables a more comprehensive understanding of human experiences across different cultures and time periods.
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What methods are commonly used to analyze texts or artifacts in the humanities?
In the humanities, analyzing texts and artifacts involves varied methodologies. Hermeneutics focuses on interpreting texts, initially biblical but now applied broadly to understand meanings within historical and cultural contexts. Literary criticism examines the structure, authorship, and historical context of texts, employing methods like New Criticism and New Historicism to explore themes and perspectives.
Semiotics studies signs and symbols, analyzing their function in language and culture. Textual criticism involves recension, examination, and emendation to determine the authenticity and meaning of texts through historical and linguistic analysis. Archaeology uses survey, excavation, and artifact analysis to reconstruct and interpret past societies' material remains.
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How can humanities scholarship help us understand cultures and societies better?
Humanities scholarship enhances our understanding of cultures and societies through its exploration of human experiences, values, and expressions. It encompasses various disciplines such as literature, history, and philosophy, providing insights into the unique ability of the human spirit.
Through methods that appreciate human values, humanities scholarship analyzes cultures, and promotes a deeper comprehension of human concerns. Contemporary conceptions emphasize the importance of education in the humanities for maintaining a healthy democracy and enabling individuals to become genuine citizens of the world.
7 Britannica Sources- humanities
- literature: Themes and their sources
- Definition of comparative literature
- historiography: Social and cultural history
- study of religion: Relationship between Western and non-Western philosophy in regard to religion
- anthropology: The anthropological study of religion
- cultural anthropology: Cultural psychology
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Humanities, those branches of knowledge that concern themselves with human beings and their culture or with analytic and critical methods of inquiry derived from an appreciation of human values and of the unique ability of the human spirit to express itself. As a group of educational disciplines, the humanities are distinguished in content and method from the physical and biological sciences and, somewhat less decisively, from the social sciences. The humanities include the study of all languages and literatures, the arts, history, and philosophy. The humanities are sometimes organized as a school or administrative division in many colleges and universities in the United States.
The modern conception of the humanities has its origin in the Classical Greek paideia, a course of general education dating from the Sophists in the mid-5th century bce, which prepared young men for active citizenship in the polis, or city-state; and in Cicero’s humanitas (literally, “human nature”), a program of training proper for orators, first set forth in De oratore (Of the Orator) in 55 bce. In the early Middle Ages the Church Fathers, including St. Augustine, himself a rhetorician, adapted paideia and humanitas—or the bonae (“good”), or liberales (“liberal”), arts, as they were also called—to a program of basic Christian education; mathematics, linguistic and philological studies, and some history, philosophy, and science were included.
The word humanitas, although not the substance of its component disciplines, dropped out of common use in the later Middle Ages but underwent a flowering and a transformation in the Renaissance. The term studia humanitatis (“studies of humanity”) was used by 15th-century Italian humanists to denote secular literary and scholarly activities (in grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, moral philosophy, and ancient Greek and Latin studies) that the humanists thought to be essentially humane and Classical studies rather than divine ones. In the 18th century, Denis Diderot and the French Encyclopédistes censured studia humanitatis for what they claimed had by then become its dry, exclusive concentration on Latin and Greek texts and language. By the 19th century, when the purview of the humanities expanded, the humanities had begun to take their identity not so much from their separation from the realm of the divine as from their exclusion of the material and methods of the maturing physical sciences, which tended to examine the world and its phenomena objectively, without reference to human meaning and purpose.
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Contemporary conceptions of the humanities resemble earlier conceptions in that they propose a complete educational program based on the propagation of a self-sufficient system of human values. But they differ in that they also propose to distinguish the humanities from the social sciences as well as from the physical sciences, and in that they dispute among themselves as to whether an emphasis on the subject matter or on the methods of the humanities is most effectual in accomplishing this distinction. In the late 19th century the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey called the humanities “the spiritual sciences” and “the human sciences” and described them, simply, as those areas of knowledge that lay outside of, and beyond, the subject matter of the physical sciences. On the other hand, Heinrich Rickert, an early 20th-century Neo-Kantian, argued that it is not subject matter but method of investigation that best characterizes the humanities; Rickert contended that whereas the physical sciences aim to move from particular instances to general laws, the human sciences are “idiographic”—they are devoted to the unique value of the particular within its cultural and human contexts and do not seek general laws. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum emphasized the crucial importance of education in the humanities for maintaining a healthy democracy, for fostering a deeper understanding of human concerns and values, and for enabling students to rise above parochial perspectives and “the bondage of habit and custom” to become genuine citizens of the world.