Humanities
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The humanities are a group of academic subjects united by a commitment to studying aspects of the human condition and a qualitative approach that generally prevents a single paradigm from coming to define any discipline. The humanities are usually distinguished from the social sciences and the natural sciences and include subjects such as the Classics, Languages, Literature, Music, Philosophy, the Performing Arts, Religion and the Visual Arts. Other subjects, at times included as humanities in some parts of the world, include Archaeology, Area studies, Communications, Cultural studies and History, although these are often regarded as social sciences, elsewhere.
Scholars working in the humanities are sometimes described as humanists. But that term also describes the philosophical position of humanism, which some antihumanist scholars in the humanities reject.
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Branches
Religion and philosophy
Most historians trace the beginnings of religious belief to the Neolithic Period. Most religious belief during this time period consisted of worship of a Mother Goddess, a Sky Father, and also worship of the Sun and the Moon as deities. (see also Sun worship)
New philosophies and religions arose in both east and west, particularly around the 6th century BCE. Over time, a great variety of religions developed around the world, with Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia being some of the earliest major faiths.
In the east, three schools of thought were to dominate Chinese thinking until the modern day. These were Taoism, Legalism, and Confucianism. The Confucian tradition, which would attain predominance, looked not to the force of law, but to the power and example of tradition for political morality. In the west, the Greek philosophical tradition, represented by the works of Plato and Aristotle, was diffused throughout Europe and the Middle East by the conquests of Alexander of Macedon in the 4th century BCE.
Abrahamic religions are those religions deriving from a common ancient Semitic tradition and traced by their adherents to Abraham (circa 1900 BCE), a patriarch whose life is narrated in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, and as a prophet in the Quran and also called a prophet in Genesis 20:7. This forms a large group of related largely monotheistic religions, generally held to include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Bahá'í Faith, and comprises about half of the world's religious adherents.
Art
The great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of six ancient civilizations:
- Ancient Egypt,
- Greece,
- Rome,
- China,
- India, or
- Mesopotamia.
Ancient Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct proportions. Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with characteristic distinguishing features (i.e. Zeus' thunderbolt).
In Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages, the dominance of the church insisted on the expression of biblical and not material truths.
The Renaissance saw the return to valuation of the material world, and this shift is reflected in art forms, which show the corporeality of the human body, and the three-dimensional reality of landscape.
Eastern art has generally worked in a style akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning and local colour (meaning the plain colour of an object, such as basic red for a red robe, rather than the modulations of that colour brought about by light, shade and reflection). A characteristic of this style is that the local colour is often defined by an outline (a contemporary equivalent is the cartoon). This is evident in, for example, the art of India, Tibet and Japan.
Religious Islamic art forbids iconography, and expresses religious ideas through geometry instead.
The physical and rational certaintiesdepicted by the 19th-century Enlightenment were shattered not only by new discoveries of relativity by Einstein [1] and of unseen psychology by Freud, [2] but also by unprecedented technological development.
Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art.
History
In the West, the study of the humanities can be traced to ancient Greece, as the basis of a broad education for citizens. During Roman times, the concept of the seven liberal arts evolved, involving grammar, rhetoric and logic (the trivium), along with arithmetic, geometry, astronomia and music (the quadrivium).Template:Ref These subjects formed the bulk of medieval education, with the emphasis being on the humanities as skills or "ways of doing."
These sections originally corresponded to Astrological concepts, namely being the seven traditional Astrological planets. A typical course of study began with grammar, ruled by the fastest planet, the Moon, and culminated with Saturn, governing Astronomia, which included both astronomy and astrology.
A major shift occurred during the Renaissance, when the humanities began to be regarded as subjects to be studied rather than practised, with a corresponding shift away from the traditional fields into areas such as literature and history. In the 20th century, this view was in turn challenged by the postmodernist movement, which sought to redefine the humanities in more egalitarian terms suitable for a democratic society.Template:Ref
The humanities today
Humanities in the West
The 1980 United States Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities described the humanities in its report, The Humanities in American Life:
Through the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope, and reason.
Meanwhile, there are many changes and debates occurring today in the humanities:
Questioning the distinctions
The very concept of the ‘humanities’ as a class or kind, distinct from the ’sciences’, has come under repeated attack in the twentieth century. T.S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific RevolutionsTemplate:Ref argued that the forces driving scientific progress often have less to do with objective inference from unbiased observation than with much more value-laden sociological and cultural factors. More recently, Richard Rorty has argued that the distinction between the sciences and the humanities is harmful to both pursuits, placing the former on an undeserved pedestal and condemning the latter to irrationality. Rorty’s position requires a wholesale rejection of such traditional philosophical distinctions as those between appearance and reality, subjective and objective, replacing them with what he endorses as a new ‘fuzziness’. This leads to a kind of pragmatism where" the oppositions between the humanities, the arts, and the sciences, might gradually fade away... In this situation, ‘the humanities’ would no longer think of themselves as such...."Template:Ref
Modernist versus postmodernist: an ongoing debate
In the United States, the late 20th century saw a challenge to the "elitism" of the humanities, which Edward Said has characterized as a "conservative philosophy of gentlemanly refinement, or sensibility." Such postmodernists argue that the humanities should go beyond the study of "dead white males" to include work by women and people of color, and without religious bias.[2] The French philosopher Michel Foucault has been a very influential part of this movement, stating in The Order of Things that "we can study only individuals, not human nature."
However some in the humanities believe that such changes may be detrimental, as they lead to moral relativism and the concept that one person's interpretation is as good as any other. The literary critic Denis Donoghue suggests that modern criticism reduces the rich symbolism of a play like Macbeth to a simplistic "find the villain", with Lady Macbeth regarded as the victim of bloody-minded, power-mad masculine society; the result is said to be what E. D. Hirsch Jr. refers to as declining cultural literacy.Template:Ref
The humanities in the digital age
Language and literature are considered to lie at the heart of the humanities, so the impact of electronic communication is of great concern to those in the field. The immediacy of modern technology and the internet speeds up communication, but may threaten "deferred" forms of communication such as literature and "dumb down" language. The library is also changing rapidly as bookshelves are replaced by computer terminals. The humanities will have to adapt rapidly to these changes if they are to remain relevant.
Institutions
President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act in 1965 [3], creating the National Council on the Humanities and funded the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 1969. NEH is an independent grant-making agency of the United States government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities.
NEH facilitated the creation of State Humanities Councils in the 56 U.S. states and territories. Each council operates independently, defining the "humanities" in relationship to the disciplines, subjects, values, etc., ... valued in the regions they serve. Councils give grant funds to individuals, scholars, and nonprofit organizations dedicated to the humanities in their region. Councils also offer diverse progams and services that respond to the needs of their communities and according to their own definitions of the humanities.
United States
- Prominent propoents of liberal arts in the United States have included Mortimer J. Adler and E.D. Hirsch.
- Advanced education in the humanities is sometimes seen as not directly practical and of little help with a career.
References
- Template:Note Levi, Albert W.; The Humanities Today, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1970.
- Template:Note Walling, Donovan R.; Under Construction: The Role of the Arts and Humanities in Postmodern Schooling Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, Bloomington, Indiana, 1997.
- Template:Note Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The University of Chicago Press, 1962.
- Template:Note Rorty, Richard, Science as Solidarity, in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers Volume I, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
- Template:Note Kernan, Alvin, editor; What's Happened to the Humanities?, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1997.
- Adler, Mortimer J.; "A Guidebook to Learning: For the Lifelong Pursuit of Wisdom"
See also
External links
ast:Ciencies humanes ca:Humanitats da:Humaniora de:Geisteswissenschaften et:Humanitaarteadused es:Humanidades eo:Homa scienco fr:Sciences humaines ko:인문 과학 he:מדעי הרוח id:Humaniora nl:Geesteswetenschappen pl:Nauki humanistyczne ja:人文科学 sv:Humaniora zh:人文科学