The ‘quasi-universality’ of the humanities (original) (raw)
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The Global and the Local in the Study of the Humanities
Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, 2015
This chapter focuses on some tensions-inherent to the humanities as a field of studies-between an epistemic commitment to truth, an ethical and political commitment to reflexivity and critique, and the quest of the arts and sciences for institutional autonomy. In the first part I delineate a quick genealogy of the problem of the humanities in three stations: the Studia Humanitatis of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries; Kant's ideas of the freedom of philosophy; and Humboldt's conceptualization of the position of the university visa -vis the state and the nation. In the second part I present the migration of the tradition of Geisteswissenschaften to Palestine and its transformation into Madaei Haruah at the Hebrew University. I conclude with a few words about the present and future of the humanities in Israel.
Introduction: What Is the History of the Humanities? (2022)
Writing the History of the Humanities: Questions, Themes and Approaches, 2022
In 2016, the opening issue of the journal History of Humanities proudly announced that a new field of research was in the process of emerging. Although humanities scholars had always engaged with the histories of their own disciplines, what was new and exciting, according to the journal editors, was that they had begun to broaden their horizons. If humanities scholars had been used to studying the history of French linguistics or Chinese historiography in relative isolation from other fields, they now began to raise comparative questions. How had Fernand de Saussure’s structuralism resonated in disciplines other than linguistics? To what extent had source critical methods been adopted across the humanities? And how is it to be explained that some humanities fields have been more receptive to postcolonial critique than others? The history of the humanities as envisioned by the journal editors thus appears as something more than an umbrella term for the history of linguistics, the history of historiography, and the history of art history. Typical for the field is its “ambition to write comparative historiographies of the humanities.” Historians of the humanities are scholars traversing across fields, through all of the humanities (and beyond), with the aim of understanding what the humanities have been, what they are today, and why they are important.
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.
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.
The idea of the humanities (2017)
This paper, or, rather, talk, thinks about the idea of the humanities which is, I think, a strangely neglected topic. It prepares the way for a realist account or theory of the humanities, partly by sketching out the difficulties and possibilities that this involves.
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
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
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.