Humanities

DanteBy Luca Signorelli.

The tomb of the Doncel of Sigüenza.

Young readingMatthias Stom.

Allegory of the earJan Van Kessel.

Actors-musics in a mosaic of the Villa di Cicerone in Pompeii, of Dioscórides de Samos.

The humanities (from the Latin humanitas) are a set of academic disciplines related to human culture. There are other generic denominations, such as the concept of "letters", which are commonly used in opposition to the so-called "sciences" (debate of the two cultures). However, there are other denominations whose identification, association or differentiation with that of «humanities» is more problematic (according to the intention of whoever uses them) and which entail different epistemological and methodological considerations: those of «social sciences» and «human sciences».. Humanistic disciplines are supposed to have a greater ideographic character: the study of particularities without creating general laws or postulates. Originally (the studia humanitatis of Renaissance humanism), humanistic knowledge or human letters were defined in opposition to divine letters. the rest, humanities, unlike human sciences, this one with a greater preference of Romanesque and Germanic and of greater epistemological solidity, constitutes a label with a dominant Anglo-Saxon orientation.

As a basic and defining element of Western civilization and the traditional educational system (in the latter they are also called humanistic education), the humanities are especially linked to the so-called classical studies: art and the culture based on Greco-Roman Antiquity and that with various additions over the centuries was shaping the so-called Western canon, which is accused of different biases by critics of this perspective (intellectualism, machismo, Eurocentrism, obsolescence) summarized in the pejorative expression dead white males.

Considering one or the other disciplines as "humanities" or "social sciences" is an academic problem that transcends mere organizational or university consideration, since it implies the scientific condition or not of one or the other knowledge (whatever it may be). the scope of such a definition, given that the criterion of scientificity is not universally accepted either). Such «scientificity» is for some authors precisely what the knowledge that aspires to approach the human condition and build social coexistence through cultivation of the past through philological and hermeneutic study does not intend to seek..

Among the disciplines or fields of study that can be considered as part of the humanities (without there being a general consensus in any enumeration of them), are philosophy, law, sociology, anthropology, political science, philology (linguistics, semiotics, literature, the history of literature, literary criticism), history, geography, art studies (plastic arts, performing arts and music, musicology, aesthetics, theory of art, art criticism), communication sciences (journalism, advertising, documentation, library science), among some others. Paradoxically, despite the initial terminological opposition, religion studies ("divinities" -divinities in English—) and theology are also often considered to be part of the "humanities."

Human Sciences

The human sciences try to complete the study of humanity by including in it the evolutionary origin, the structure of the human being, its functioning, its hereditary characteristics and its behavior, as individuals and as a society. Regarding the evolution of humanity, the great contributions come from physical anthropology presenting the modern human being as a result of the last evolutionary episode. Anatomy was founded on direct observation of the human frame in Alexandria around 300 B.C. C. Physiology had its beginnings at the time when the Englishman William Harvey went to study in Padua in 1598. The expression moral sciences had the advantage of indicating that such sciences dealt with the products of activity mentality of the human being and were not intended to study the organism, but by the XVIII century the authors called moralists were actually psychologists. According to Michel Foucault, the human sciences were born in the XIX century under a model of scientific rationality. The human sciences too They are called spiritual sciences from the proposal of Wilhelm Dilthey, whose object of study is the historical-cultural environment in which the human being is immersed.

Human thought and language

In the three great areas of human thought, the world of ideas has taken shape: the sciences of the spirit. Religion is considered to be the one that has focused on the spirit, while science has focused on matter. Philosophy has tried to link these two schools based on conscious reflection and has recently proposed a theory that could integrate all three: constructivism. For humanism, the dignity of man was constituted by the creative power of the intellect. During the Enlightenment, an attempt was made to replace superstitious and submissive faith with enlightened and illuminating reason. The humanities have focused on purely human activities, such as thought and language, which are systematized as knowledge in philosophy and linguistics and, at the same time, become means for the human being to develop self awareness. The study of thought and language as cognition, and therefore of symbols and representations, gave rise to cognitive science. For Howard Gardner, language and mathematics are two of the intelligences shared by all human beings, systems of meaning culturally devised to process important forms of information. In education these intelligences have been developed through reading, writing and calculation. From pedagogy, constructivism is also considered as a way of integrating the forms of learning that have been privileged in the acquisition of knowledge. Therefore the humanities are the disciplines that study man and his behavior in society.

Edgar Morin proposes that in the education of the future it is necessary to teach the human condition and proposes various triads, called loops by him, that support the concept of the human, such as: brain-mind-culture, reason-affection-impulse, individual-society-species. He ends his book by inviting the continuation of hominization into humanization, via promotion to terrestrial citizenship.