The humanities began as a Renaissance alternative to studying divinity
In Renaissance universities, studying the humanities meant reading classical Latin and Greek authors instead of theology. The scholars who championed this course became known as humanists, and they helped revive ancient learning across Europe. Today the label has flipped into a catch-all for fields that are not science, mathematics or professional training.
The term goes back to the Latin studia humanitatis, the study of humanity, a curriculum of grammar, literature, rhetoric, history and moral philosophy built on ancient texts. From the related word humanitas came the Italian coinage umanisti. Modern humanities stretch much further, taking in philosophy, religion, history, literature and rhetoric, theatre, music and dance, and painting, photography and film.
What sets them apart is method. The philosopher Wilhelm Windelband drew a famous line between two approaches. The humanities are idiographic, focusing on the particular and the context-bound through critical, interpretive and speculative work with a strong historical dimension. The social sciences are nomothetic, searching for general laws through measurement and data. The boundary is blurry in practice: sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists often use textual analysis and narrative methods familiar to historians and literary critics.
Several fields sit uneasily on the fence. History is traditionally a humanities subject, yet some classify it as a social science, a view that is contested. Law can look like a social science for its measurable rules or a humanities discipline for its focus on values and interpretation. Linguistics is usually treated as a science, but the study of particular languages and their literatures lies at the core of the humanities, and much twentieth-century philosophy, influenced by Wittgenstein, asked whether our confusions come from the words we use.
Classical studies, once a cornerstone, lost popularity during the twentieth century, though Greek and Roman ideas still shape philosophy and literature. Arguments about the practical value of the humanities continue. Their defenders point to self-reflection, civic responsibility and cultural continuity, and to the role that questions of meaning and creativity play in public life.
Source: Humanities
