As Regards the Humanities An Approach to their Theory through History and Philosophy (original) (raw)
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The Making of the Humanities : Volume II - From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines
2012
List of Figures 419 Index 421 manism to historicism, Bos focuses on two humanist historians (Machiavelli and Guicciardini) and two nineteenth-century historians (Ranke and Droysen). His starting point is Machiavelli's and Guicciardini's painful experience that the old world of Italian city-states was lost. A similar dissociation of the past occurred Break or continuity in the humanities? Various papers in this volume suggest that the notion of a revolution in the humanities around 1800 is more problematic than has been previously assumed. While the nineteenth century brought discipline formation and specialized methodologies, several concepts and ideas were in existence already well before 1800 and were consolidated among scholars, for instance in philology, linguistics, musicology and historiography (Leerssen, Semi, Van Hal). New in the nineteenth century was especially the academic institutionalization of disciplines (Elffers, Paul, Jørgensen), not so much the nature of humanistic knowledge as a whole. Universities guaranteed stability and continuity, but these also existed among Notes The first conference in this series was 'The Making of the Humanities: First International Conference on the History of the Humanities', which took place from - October at the University of Amsterdam. The second conference was 'The Making of the Humanities II: Second International Conference on the History of the Humanities' , which took place from - October also at the
The History of Humanities and the History of Science
The humanities and the sciences have a strongly connected history, yet their histories continue to be written separately. Although the scope of the history of science has undergone a tremendous broadening during the past few decades, scholars of the history of the humanities and the history of science still seem to belong to two separate cultures that have endured through the past century. This Focus section explores what common ground would enable a study of the histories of the humanities and the sciences to investigate their shared epistemic objects, virtues, values, methods, and practices.
Philosophy
In this paper I aim to state the nature of the humanities, contrasting them with the natural sciences. I argue that, compared with the natural sciences, the humanities have their own objects, their own aims, and their own methods.
Many histories of science have been written, but A New History of the Humanities offers the first overarching history of the humanities from Antiquity to the present. There are already historical studies of musicology, logic, art history, linguistics, and historiography, but this volume gathers these, and many other humanities disciplines, into a single coherent account. Its central theme is the way in which scholars throughout the ages and in virtually all civilizations have sought to identify patterns in texts, art, music, languages, literature, and the past. What rules can we apply if we wish to determine whether a tale about the past is trustworthy? By what criteria are we to distinguish consonant from dissonant musical intervals? What rules jointly describe all possible grammatical sentences in a language? How can modern digital methods enhance pattern-seeking in the humanities? Rens Bod contends that the hallowed opposition between the sciences (mathematical, experimental, dominated by universal laws) and the humanities (allegedly concerned with unique events and hermeneutic methods) is a mistake born of a myopic failure to appreciate the pattern-seeking that lies at the heart of this inquiry. A New History of the Humanities amounts to a persuasive plea to give Panini, Valla, Bopp, and countless other often overlooked intellectual giants their rightful place next to the likes of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.
A Very Short History of the Humanities: Patterns versus Interpretations
This paper sketches the long term history of the humanities by discussing the empirical versus the interpretative traditions in the humanities. For several centuries, empiricism has almost exclusively been attributed to the sciences. The sciences search for general patterns and principles, while the humanities aim at understanding unique events. The sciences try to explain the world, while the humanities aim at interpreting it. The sciences aim for objectivity while the humanities are subjective and speculative. These oppositions are much older than C.P. Snow’s well-known two cultures debate; they can be traced back to Antiquity and are – perhaps surprisingly -- rooted in the disciplines that we nowadays call ‘humanities’. From at least the third century BCE onwards, there have been two kinds of practices in philology, historiography, poetics, the study of art and the study of music. On the one hand people searched for regularities and patterns, while on the other hand they searched for the unique and the exceptional. Both approaches have not disappeared from the humanities since then. In this essay I shall sketch the longue durée of the pattern-seeking tradition in the humanities and compare it to the interpretative tradition. I will argue that interpretations were not always in opposition to pattern-seeking but were often constructed on the patterns found. Finally I will come back to the relation between humanities and science, arguing that the common wisdom that the humanities are moving towards science when they search for patterns is mistaken. The search for patterns has been a continuous line in the humanities from Antiquity onwards.
A Comparative Framework for Studying the Histories of the Humanities and Science
While the humanities and the sciences have a closely connected history, there are no general histories that bring the two fields together on an equal footing. This paper argues that there is a level at which some humanistic and scientific disciplines can be brought under a common denominator and compared. This is at the level of underlying methods, especially at the level of formalisms and rule systems used by different disciplines. The essay formally compares linguistics and computer science by noting that the same grammar formalism was used in the 1950s for describing both human and programming languages. Additionally, it examines the influence of philology on molecular biology, and vice versa, by recognizing that the tree-formalism and rule system used for text reconstruction was also employed in DNA genetics. It also shows that rule systems for source criticism in history are used in forensic science, evidence-based medicine, and jurisprudence. This paper thus opens up a new comparative approach within which the histories of the humanities and the sciences can be examined on a common level.
This introduction situates the forum in the recent scholarship on the “two cultures.” It argues that for a long time two concepts exerted a powerful influence over our thinking about the intertwined histories of the sciences and the humanities: “the Scientific Revolution,” by offering a historical beginning for their separation, and C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” thesis, by offering an end point for this development. Of late both of them have lost in persuasiveness. Recent research offers a more balanced view of the innovations of seventeenth-century naturalists, puts more weight on developments that took place during the long nineteenth century, and highlights the limits of the division. Instead of presupposing a single, unified divide, different attempts to demarcate both the sciences and the humanities have to be studied with an eye on the specifics of their intellectual, disciplinary, and wider cultural contexts. This forum maps the problem in this vein, offers different interpretations, and widens the scope of our discussion in both geographical and chronological terms. to demarcate both the sciences and the humanities have to be studied with an eye on the specifics of their intellectual, disciplinary, and wider cultural contexts. This forum maps the problem in this vein, offers different interpretations, and widens the scope of our discussion in both geographical and chronological terms. the innovations of seventeenth-century naturalists, puts more weight on developments that took place during the long nineteenth century, and highlights the limits of the division. Instead of presupposing a single, unified divide, different attempts to demarcate both the sciences and the humanities have to be studied with an eye on the specifics of their intellectual, disciplinary, and wider cultural contexts. This forum maps the problem in this vein, offers different interpretations, and widens the scope of our discussion in both geographical and chronological terms. Few
Humanities across Time and Space: Four Challenges for a New Discipline
While histories within the context of a single humanities discipline have been written for more than a century, it is only over the last decade that we have witnessed histories that go beyond single humanities disciplines and that bring together different fields, periods or regions. It thus comes as a surprise that virtually no studies go into the methodological problems of the new métier. Questions abound: What do we mean by “bringing together” different humanities fields across time and space? Should we study their shared concepts, methods, virtues, research practices, historical actors, pedagogical practices, personal interactions, or yet something else? And when in history can we speak of the “humanities” as a group of disciplines? And how can we compare the humanities from different parts of the world? In this essay, I will discuss four methodological challenges which I believe to be constitutive for the history of the humanities as a field. These are the challenges of demarcation, anachronism, eurocentrism and incommensurability. Any history of the humanities that goes beyond the scope of a single discipline, period or region will have to address at least one of these challenges. While none of my challenges have absolute solutions, I will give a motivated choice for each of them. I will argue that my solutions provide a viable way to write a comparative history of the humanities, and that we can therefore speak of them as maxims. Although the preferred solutions will differ among historians, the challenges remain the same. At the end of my essay, I will discuss other possible solutions to the challenges, as well as other possible challenges for the history of the humanities, such as the challenge of forgotten scholars, non-academic humanities and colonial humanities. Finally, I will go into the relation between the history of the humanities and the history of science and knowledge.
A New Field: History of Humanities
These are exciting times for the humanities. The impressive corpus of knowledge that the humanities have discovered, created, and cultivated over many centuries is available for the benefit of more people than ever and evolving rapidly. Fresh perspectives open up as digital tools enable researchers to explore questions that not long ago were beyond their reach and even their imagination. Novel fields of research deal with phenomena emerging in a globalizing culture, enabling us to make sense of the way in which new media affect our lives. Cross-fertilization between disciplines leads to newly developed methods and results, such as the complex chemical analysis of the materials of ancient artworks, yielding data that were unavailable to both artists and their publics at the time of production, or neuroscientific experiments shedding new light on our capacity for producing and appreciating music. At the same time, there is a sense of gloom, perhaps even crisis, among those who are convinced that the humanities are valuable, precious, indispensable. The number of students taking humanities courses declines, and humanities departments at universities worldwide are subject to severe budget cuts or abolition altogether. In a period in which the academic world is plagued by governments insisting on measurable results for the sake of short-term financial profit, the humanities seem most vulnerable. We present the first issue of History of Humanities with feelings of anticipation. Our journal is meant to stand for the fact that scholarly practices of a type today labeled " humanities " have been an essential part of the process of knowledge making ever since human inquisitiveness sought to enhance our understanding of the world and ourselves. This long history has been studied in fruitful and illuminating ways, but the focus has been on either the natural sciences or on single disciplines within the humanities, such as history writing and linguistics. The fundamental contribution of the humanities to the intricate web of knowledge that scholars, thinkers, and researchers have spun in the course of several millennia has thus been poorly recognized and is consequently undervalued. We intend to redress the imbalance in the historiography of the search for knowledge that mankind has been engaged in for so long.