CIRCA:Brief History of the Humanities

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Humanities: the Term ‘Humanities’ and the History of the Humanities

According to Dr. Mike Lippman, University of Arizona, Department of Classics, the Humanities as a collective concept originates in 5th century BC, Greece, where we find the first concentrated development of tragedy or drama, comedy, philosophy, history, all the major disciplines included in the Humanities today.#

The online dictionary defines the Humanities as one part of what is referred to as the Liberal Arts. Also included under the umbrella of Liberal Arts are the natural sciences, arts, and social sciences. The Liberal Arts include those topics that are not professional or technical subjects. The term can be dated to between 1745–55, translated from the Latin artēs līberālēs, meaning works befitting a freeman.#

The term Liberal Arts was coined to refer to core skills employed in classical antiquity thought to foster virtue, knowledge, and articulation, all the skills necessary to participate in civic life and public debate. Such skills included grammar, rhetoric, and logic, known in medieval times as the Trivium, three of the foundations that would later form the basis for the Humanities. During the era of the medieval church, the Trivium was expanded to the natural sciences, including arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, referred to then as the Quadrivium.

The term Humanities comes from the Latin humanus, meaning human, cultured and refined, and originates with the Renaissance ‘humanists’ who redefined the traditional subjects of the Trivium as the Studia Humanitatis, removing logic and then adding to their newly defined corpus such disciplines as Greek studies, (to complement the Latin grammar), history, poetry, and ethics.# As such, the Humanities were born.


Disciplines Typically Included in the Humanities

As defined by the Ohio Humanities Council,# the disciplines of the Humanities include Archaeology, Comparative Religion, Ethics, History, Languages & Linguistics, Literature, Jurisprudence, Philosophy, History, Theory, Criticism of the Arts, and the Social Sciences.


  • Where the term came from
  • What disciplines are typically in the humanities
  • The social sciences and arts - and why they are also sometimes in the humanities - "interpretative social sciences"
  • How is it different in French "sciences humaines"
  • split with sciences - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
  • split with professional programmes
  • the liberal arts- Yale report, Cardinal Newman has a book "The Idea of the Univesity"


References

Mike Lippman. "Where the Humanities Come From", University of Arizona Humanities Seminars Program, 2010. Website, accessed Oct 29, 2012. http://humanities.arizona.edu/humanities-seminar-program/courses/where-humanities-come-greece-fifth-century-bce

Dictionary.com - Liberal Arts, Website, accessed Oct 27, 2012. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/liberal+arts

Wikipedia - Liberal Arts Education. Website, accessed Oct 28, 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education

What are the Humanities: as defined by the Ohio Humanities Council. Website, accessed October 17, 2012 http://www.units.muohio.edu/technologyandhumanities/humanitiesdefinition.htm

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