Friday, March 6, 2009

Is Philosophy Part of the Humanities?

I've been reading a number of articles recently that discuss the fate of the humanities. A couple of days ago someone put a copy of a New York Times article "In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth" in my box. And the literary critic Stanley Fish has posted several comments on the same site on the topic of the value of a humanities education. His entry on the "Last Professor" discusses the book with that title by Frank Donaghue, who argues that the humanities don't so much face a crisis but rather are already on their deathbed as the university becomes driven by purely practical concerns. "...all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and history will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary" writes Donoghue, according to Fish. Fish himself notes wistfully that he was lucky to get into the humanities business when things were still good, but otherwise seems to think Donoghue's pessimistic prognosis is correct.

I am not by inclination pessimistic. I also tend to think that the present is not that different from the past, and that in some sense the humanities have been dying and coming back to life (sometimes in new forms) as long as they have been around. What may appear to us as imminent demise may just be another stage in development.

But I'm not so interested in all that. I'm more interested in the question of whether philosophy is one of the humanities. I'm not so sure it is. According to Berry's general education classification, it is, but that is just a result of an arbitrary bureaucratic classification. Certainly it would be hard to make the case that the kind of philosophy I do has much in common with the other disciplines lumped together as humanities. I suppose that the humanities are concerned with the study of humanity. But my current research interest in philosophical logic is not principally (or, at all, for that matter) concerned with humans. And many sciences (biology, economics, political science) not usually considered humanities study humans. So such a characterization of the humanities as the study of humans is not very helpful.

There must be a special method or approach that distinguishes the humanities from other disciplines. But there again I think that much of philosophy would fail to be humanistic. Except for the more historical/literary approaches to philosophy, a lot of philosophy, especially the analytic sort, resembles more in its approach the formal methods of mathematics and linguistics than what usually goes on in literature or history departments.

So help me out here. What makes a discipline humanistic? And does philosophy as a whole (as opposed to just some forms of philosophy) count as humanistic?

4 comments:

Zach Sherwin said...

Ready for a false dichotomy? What better way is there to start a philosophical argument that stating beforehand that you're primarily appealing to a logical fallacy! All the better, I suppose; at least you'll know that I don't claim to be objectively perfect :-)

Well, I'm not exactly certain, but it seems to me that sciences deal with objective phenomena, while humanities deal with subjective (for those who are not aware, this does not mean relative) phenomena. Thus, Biology and Astronomy, though there exists speculation in both, are sciences, as they deal with objective phenomena. Similarly, History and Art deal with subjective phenomena, and thus are humanities.

One might argue that philosophy deals with objective arguments, but "philosophy" in this sense is overambiguous. Let's consider Berry's Philosophy classes...

Intro to Philosophy: Subjective
Critical Thinking: Objective
Symb Log: Objective
Ancient and Medieval: Subjective
Modern: Subjective
Contemporary: Subjective
That's a 2:1 ratio in favor of subjectivity...

Thus, at Berry, the Humanities win.

(Unless I'm forgetting some classes)

michael papazian said...

Yes, Zach's comments are helpful. So philosophy (at Berry) is a mix of humanities and non-humanities but with the humanities part dominating. I wonder if this is true about the other humanistic disciplines. Would historians agree that they are dealing with subjective phenomena? It may be good to define "subjective."

Tricia said...

Or does the label "humanities" mean that the subject of the study is a more fundamental human curiosity? Rather than being ends-oriented like business, education, or technical in nature. Under that approach, all intro or survey classes could be classified as "out of curiosity".

I guess I'm assuming that to be fundamentally human is to be curious and to seek after knowledge to satisfy curiosity.

Or perhaps those fundamental human questions would be ones like "what is it to be a human?" and the answer could look something like history, intro to philosophy, art, music, psychology, etc. In order to include the study of logic, you'd have to come down on the side of "humans are curious about reason" or something like that as a fundamental characteristic.

michael papazian said...

The curiosity criterion that Tricia proposes is important, but I think it helps define the liberal arts more broadly rather than the humanities. Humans don't seem to me any more curiosity-worthy than stars, ferns, or numbers. But maybe that's because I'm not a humanist.