Abstract
The humanities represent a type of knowledge distinct from, and yet encompassing, scientific knowledge. Drawing on philosophical hermeneutics in the tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften, as well as on the Latin rhetorical tradition and on Greek paideia, this essay presents humanities knowledge as “involved knowing”. Science, in principle, abstracts from the subjective, psychological conditions of knowing, including its emotional and willful determinants, as introducing personal biases, and it attempts also to neutralize historical and cultural contingencies. Humanities knowledge, in contrast, focuses attention on precisely these subjective and historical factors as intrinsic to any knowledge in its full human purport. In particular, poetry, which historically is the matrix of knowledge in all fields, including science, deliberately explores and amply expresses these specifically human registers of significance. The poetic underpinnings of knowledge actually remain crucial to human knowing and key to interpreting its significance in all domains, including the whole range of scientific fields, throughout the course of its development and not least in the modern age so dominated by science and technology.
Highlights
The humanities represent a type of knowledge distinct from, and yet encompassing, scientific knowledge
If any, do the humanities represent? Posing epistemological questions concerning the nature and conditions of knowledge in the disciplines that come under this rubric might
With some broad theoretical considerations concerning the study of the humanities is already a way of embarking on them [1]
Summary
If any, do the humanities represent? Posing epistemological questions concerning the nature and conditions of knowledge in the disciplines that come under this rubric might. It is enough to hang on to just the first verse for its suggestiveness concerning what may be considered the objective of the kind of study undertaken in the humanities, namely, the attempt to learn to think with and through feelings and in light of images, and to cultivate what in tradition has often been called “the intelligence of the heart.” In putting it that way, I am echoing the. The requirement of fixing one’s objectives before one even begins belongs rather to the methodology of science as a technology for achieving practical aims and—even more problematically—expresses the demands of an information-crazy culture based on clear-cut bites of unambiguous data Such a culture preserves little or nothing of the genuine scientific spirit of search for knowledge through experience and by inquiry into the unknown, but only the mechanical, calculating aspects of science as exploited in technologies of mass production. The pedagogue’s knowledge of the matter of the humanities is not different in kind from the beginning student’s, but it has been painstakingly trained in ways that may prove to be of service in leading others down the path of discovery of the human and imaginative worlds embodied in these texts
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