The Global and the Local in the Study of the Humanities (original) (raw)
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Koers - Bulletin for Christian Scholarship, 2006
The residues of freedom. […] tendencies toward true humanism": thoughts on the role of the humanities at the beginning of the twenty-first century Remarks from Kant's third critique, "The Critique of Judgement", are taken as guidelines to develop a view on works of art as vessels of knowledge and judgements about what the world appears to be, can be and ought to be. In itself, Kant's remarks amount to a justification of the study of the arts, i.e. it is for the sake of a world where human beings may experience other human beings as companions in the project to sustain human life. The viability of such an endeavour is borne out by, for example, a recent performance of Beethoven in a most adverse context, and by the fact of international treaties in the past decade against some of the most serious violations of human rights. These treaties could not have been possible were it not for the artistic explorations of the tragedies of these violations. 1 Adapted from a paper originally read at a conference on "What are the humanities for? Valuing and re-valuing the humanities in South Africa", Potchefstroom University, 12-14 September 2002. (12 September 2002 was the 25th commemoration of the death of Steve Bantu Biko.) I am indebted to Johann Rossouw and Calvin Seerveld for incisive remarks which, due to lack of space in this article, will hopefully bear fruit in future work.
The Status of the Humanities in The 21st Century: A Case Study
2020
From the time of ancient Greece until late nineteenth-century Europe, the humanities enjoyed a status of respect and prestige. From the latter half of the 1990s, their status and prestige dropped, mainly due to the low economic value of the humanities for a goal-oriented generation and due to the limited representation of humanities graduates in centers of power and employment. The current study illuminates the efforts of Israel's institutions of higher education to attract students and the need for the humanities in 2020. The article explores the resources involved in the study, thought, psychological comprehension, knowledge base, and aesthetic development characteristic of humanities disciplines. Select examples from the field of the arts illustrate the humanities' unique contribution to a world focused on technology, science, and the pursuit of money and profit. This study focuses on Israel as a case study that illuminates the status of the humanities in institutions of higher education around the world. The state of these studies in Israel was explored through learning products approach and ways of coping with the challenges of the twenty-first century, and highlights the significance of humanities studies in the technological world into which contemporary academic institutions have been drawn. This research discusses the paradigmatic change in higher education from contentcentered to learning-centered academic programs and from STEM to STEAM.
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES & SOCIAL STUDIES
2016
The aim of this paper is to examine the nature, scope and importance of philosophy in the light of its relation to other disciplines. This work pays its focus on the various fundamental problems of philosophy, relating to Ethics, Metaphysics, Epistemology Logic, and its association with scientific realism. It will also highlight the various facets of these problems and the role of philosophers to point out the various issues relating to human issues. It is widely agreed that philosophy as a multi-dimensional subject that shows affinity to others branches of philosophy like, Philosophy of Science, Humanities, Physics and Mathematics, but this paper also seeks, a philosophical nature towards the universal problems of nature. It evaluates the contribution and sacrifices of the great sages of philosophers to promote the clarity and progress in the field of philosophy.
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
Humanities: State and prospects
Sign Systems Studies, 2008
The developments in the humanities over the recent years could be characterised by the following three tendencies: florescence of methodological "turns", increasing importance of interdisciplinarity, and extensive travelling of concepts. Looking at the list of titles of the books and articles produced in humanistic and social disciplines over the recent years one is led to believe that we are living in a time of "turns". New methodological turns are announced time and again, for instance, most recently, the performative turn, the spatial turn, and the iconic turn. Although each of these turns was first announced within a particular discipline, the ambition has usually been greater, proclaiming changes in the humanistic and social sciences in general. Evidently, scholars are eager to find methodological platforms to bridge the current classifications of sciences and to create new interdisciplinary fields of research. Clifford Geertz has aptly termed the process "blurring of genres". As has been argued by Mieke Bal, interdisciplinarity in the humanities mainly relies on concepts. Progress in the humanities means, first and foremost, emergence of new concepts and change or expansion of the semantic space of the old ones. The last few years indeed appear to have been the heyday for travelling concepts. In order to give a survey of the new "turns", emergent interdisciplines and travelling concepts in the humanities, Estonian academic journal Keel ja Kirjandus ("Language and Literature") recently published a special issue on "Humanities: States and Prospects". The editor of the special issue, Marek Tamm, also interviewed at this occasion several internationally renowned
The Humanities through the Lens of Migration: Richard Koebner’s Transition from Germany to Jerusalem
Naharaim, 2017
The present article turns the spotlight onto epistemic-normative dilemmas that, in my estimation, stand at the heart of the humanities as a field of study (the reason for the hyphen between epistemic and normative will become evident as we progress). For the sake of elucidating these productive tensions, we will delve into the thought of Richard Koebner (1885–1958) – a Jewish historian that emigrated from Germany to Palestine in 1934. This transition crystallized the above-mentioned dilemmas in his own mind, from both a personal and theoretical standpoint. More specifically, he developed a critical historiographic outlook on the past and present alike. A major focus of his deliberations was the nature of humanistic knowledge, not least historiography. Though this question preoccupied Koebner throughout his academic career, the new circumstances in Palestine/Israel sharpened and shaped his perspective.