Humanities
--academic disciplines that study human culture, including
classical studies, language, literature, philosophy, religion, and
visual/performing arts
--closely aligned with, or incorporates all social sciences,
history, anthropology, sociology, law, and linguistics
--derived from the Renaissance Latin expression, studia hamanitatis, or study of humanitas, a term referring to humanity
at large but also more specifically to culture, refinement, and education (the
education befitting a cultivated person)
--the Humanities emphasize the value in studying human
cultural and intellectual development
--the humanities are defended as being crucial to developing
critical self-awareness and self-reflection
--the Renaissance, the rebirth of learning that moved the
western world away from the Dark Ages, is closely connected with the
development of humanistic learning
--today the humanities is central to the concept of a
“liberal arts education” and the core curricula at most universities are based
on the humanities
--According to The Humanities in American Life,” a 1980
report by the Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities:
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 the world in which
irrationality, despair, loneliness,
and death are as conspicuous as
birth, friendship, hope, and reason
--often today the humanities are attacked as either being
irrelevant and/or ineffective in preparing students for the job market
--the humanities and the sciences are often seen as
opposites. While Humanities offer an
interpretative method for finding “truth,” and even today questions the concept
of “truth,” science empirically deals with causes and effects and ignores the
subjectivity of human existence
--an Artificial Intelligence expert, Marvin Minsky,
declared: “With all the money that we are wasting on humanities and art—give me
that money and I will build you to be a better student
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