Why the Humanities Are Not Science: Thinking Comparatively from Aristotle

Abstract

This essay examines a venerable question in Western culture: how to distinguish the ”humanities” from other forms of knowledge. The Aristotelian threefold division of the sciences in Part I of the essay, in contrast to some familiar but unsatisfactory options for defining the humanities from modernity to antiquity, is re-considered as a basis for a different approach to the subject. Part II, however, relates the divergent system of knowledge taxonomy in historical Chinese culture to provide the necessary comparative context. From a brief review of what Aristotle proposes as criteria for true knowledge as distinct from opinion or belief, Part III proceeds to present his formulation of the theoretical sciences (metaphysics, mathematics, and physics) mandating necessary hypotheses and propositions that aim to end in absolute certitude of knowledge. The practical sciences (ethics and politics), by contrast, have as their end not knowledge but right action. In Part IV, Aristotle's understanding of the productive sciences (articulated principally in the Poetics) and his concept of mimesis as an artificial or artful product lead to our thesis that the humanities represent the study of the meaning of human products. Such meaning, according to Aristotle, is inseparably tied to deciphering the rational process of how a thing is made and made well. The essay’s closing section further argues, however, that even in this compelling schematization of Aristotle, contextualized comparatively by brief reflection on Chinese materials and language, the separation of the humanities from what we regard today as natural or physical sciences cannot be complete or absolute.