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Humanities

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Education

   The humanities are a group of academic subjects united by a commitment
   to studying aspects of the human condition and a qualitative approach
   that generally prevents a single paradigm from coming to define any
   discipline. The humanities are usually distinguished from the social
   sciences and the natural sciences and include subjects such as the
   classics, languages, literature, music, philosophy, the performing
   arts, religion and the visual arts. Other subjects at times included as
   humanities in some parts of the world include archaeology, area
   studies, communications, cultural studies and history, although these
   are often regarded as social sciences elsewhere.
   The philosopher Plato
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   The philosopher Plato

Branches

Arts

   The arts are usually considered as part of the humanities. These
   include visual arts such as painting and sculpture, as well as
   performing arts such as theatre and dance, and literature. Other
   humanities such as language are sometimes considered to be part of the
   arts, for example as the language arts.

Visual art

History

   "Quatrain on Heavenly Mountain" by Emperor Gaozong
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   "Quatrain on Heavenly Mountain" by Emperor Gaozong

   The great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of the
   ancient civilizations:
     * Ancient Egypt,
     * Greece and Rome,
     * China,
     * India, or
     * Mesopotamia.

   Ancient Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the
   development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and
   anatomically correct proportions. Ancient Roman art depicted gods as
   idealized humans, shown with characteristic distinguishing features
   (i.e. Zeus' thunderbolt).

   In Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages, the dominance of the
   church insisted on the expression of biblical and not material truths.

   The Renaissance saw the return to valuation of the material world, and
   this shift is reflected in art forms, which show the corporeality of
   the human body, and the three-dimensional reality of landscape.

   Eastern art has generally worked in a style akin to Western medieval
   art, namely a concentration on surface patterning and local colour
   (meaning the plain colour of an object, such as basic red for a red
   robe, rather than the modulations of that colour brought about by
   light, shade and reflection). A characteristic of this style is that
   the local colour is often defined by an outline (a contemporary
   equivalent is the cartoon). This is evident in, for example, the art of
   India, Tibet and Japan.
   An artist's palette
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   An artist's palette

   Religious Islamic art forbids iconography, and expresses religious
   ideas through geometry instead.

   The physical and rational certainties depicted by the 19th-century
   Enlightenment were shattered not only by new discoveries of relativity
   by Einstein and of unseen psychology by Freud, but also by
   unprecedented technological development.

   Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent
   influence of other cultures into Western art.

Classics

   The classics, in the Western academic tradition, refer to cultures of
   classical antiquity, namely the Ancient Greek and Roman cultures.
   Classical study was formerly considered one of the cornerstones of the
   humanities, but the classics declined in importance during the 20th
   century. Nevertheless, the influence of classical ideas in humanities
   such as philosophy and literature remain strong.

History

   History is systematically collected information about the past. When
   used as the name of a field of study, history refers to the study and
   interpretation of the record of humans, families, and societies.
   Knowledge of history is often said to encompass both knowledge of past
   events and historical thinking skills.

   Traditionally, the study of history has been considered a part of the
   humanities. However, in modern academia, history is increasingly
   classified as a social science, especially when chronology is the
   focus.

Languages and literature

   Shakespeare wrote some of the greatest works in English literature.
   Enlarge
   Shakespeare wrote some of the greatest works in English literature.

   The study of individual modern and classical languages form the
   backbone of modern study of the humanities, while the scientific study
   of language is known as linguistics and is a social science. Since many
   areas of the humanities such as literature, history and philosophy are
   based on language, changes in language can have a profound effect on
   the other humanities. Literature, covering a variety of uses of
   language including prose forms (such as the novel), poetry and drama,
   also lies at the heart of the modern humanities curriculum.
   College-level programs in a foreign language usually include study of
   important works of the literature in that language, as well as the
   language itself (grammar, vocabulary, etc.).

Performing arts

   The performing arts differ from the plastic arts insofar as the former
   uses the artist's own body, face, presence as a medium, and the latter
   uses materials such as clay, metal or paint which can be molded or
   transformed to create some art object.

   Performing arts include acrobatics, busking, comedy, dance, magic,
   music, opera, film, juggling, marching arts, such as brass bands, and
   theatre.

   Artists who participate in these arts in front of an audience are
   called performers, including actors, comedians, dancers, musicians, and
   singers. Performing arts are also supported by workers in related
   fields, such as songwriting and stagecraft.

   Performers often adapt their appearance, such as with costumes and
   stage makeup, etc.

   There is also a specialized form of fine art in which the artists
   perform their work live to an audience. This is called Performance art.
   Most performance art also involves some form of plastic art, perhaps in
   the creation of props. Dance was often referred to as a plastic art
   during the Modern dance era.

   Music

   Music as an academic discipline mainly focuses on two career paths,
   music performance (focused on the orchestra and the concert hall) and
   music education (training music teachers). Students learn to play
   instruments, but also study music theory, musicology, history of music
   and composition. In the liberal arts tradition, music is also used to
   broaden skills of non-musicians by teaching skills such as
   concentration and listening.

   Theatre

   Theatre or theatre (Greek "theatron", θέατρον) is the branch of the
   performing arts concerned with acting out stories in front of an
   audience using combinations of speech, gesture, music, dance, sound and
   spectacle — indeed any one or more elements of the other performing
   arts. In addition to the standard narrative dialogue style, theatre
   takes such forms as opera, ballet, mime, kabuki, classical Indian
   dance, Chinese opera, mummers' plays, and pantomime.

Dance

   Dance (from Old French dancier, perhaps from Frankish) generally refers
   to human movement either used as a form of expression or presented in a
   social, spiritual or performance setting.

   Dance is also used to describe methods of non-verbal communication (see
   body language) between humans or animals ( bee dance, mating dance),
   motion in inanimate objects (the leaves danced in the wind), and
   certain musical forms or genres.

   Choreography is the art of making dances, and the person who does this
   is called a choreographer.

   Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on social,
   cultural, aesthetic artistic and moral constraints and range from
   functional movement (such as Folk dance) to codified, virtuoso
   techniques such as ballet. In sports, gymnastics, figure skating and
   synchronized swimming are dance disciplines while Martial arts ' kata'
   are often compared to dances.

Religion and philosophy

   Most historians trace the beginnings of religious belief to the
   Neolithic Period. Most religious belief during this time period
   consisted of worship of a Mother Goddess, a Sky Father, and also
   worship of the Sun and the Moon as deities. (see also Sun worship)

   New philosophies and religions arose in both east and west,
   particularly around the 6th century BC. Over time, a great variety of
   religions developed around the world, with Hinduism and Buddhism in
   India, Zoroastrianism in Persia being some of the earliest major
   faiths.

   In the east, three schools of thought were to dominate Chinese thinking
   until the modern day. These were Taoism, Legalism, and Confucianism.
   The Confucian tradition, which would attain predominance, looked not to
   the force of law, but to the power and example of tradition for
   political morality. In the west, the Greek philosophical tradition,
   represented by the works of Plato and Aristotle, was diffused
   throughout Europe and the Middle East by the conquests of Alexander of
   Macedon in the 4th century BC.

   Abrahamic religions are those religions deriving from a common ancient
   Semitic tradition and traced by their adherents to Abraham (circa 1900
   BCE), a patriarch whose life is narrated in the Hebrew Bible/ Old
   Testament, and as a prophet in the Quran and also called a prophet in
   Genesis 20:7. This forms a large group of related largely monotheistic
   religions, generally held to include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and
   the Bahá'í Faith, and comprises about half of the world's religious
   adherents.

History of the humanities

   In the West, the study of the humanities can be traced to ancient
   Greece, as the basis of a broad education for citizens. During Roman
   times, the concept of the seven liberal arts evolved, involving
   grammar, rhetoric and logic (the trivium), along with arithmetic,
   geometry, astronomia and music (the quadrivium). These subjects formed
   the bulk of medieval education, with the emphasis being on the
   humanities as skills or "ways of doing."

   A major shift occurred during the Renaissance, when the humanities
   began to be regarded as subjects to be studied rather than practised,
   with a corresponding shift away from the traditional fields into areas
   such as literature and history. In the 20th century, this view was in
   turn challenged by the postmodernist movement, which sought to redefine
   the humanities in more egalitarian terms suitable for a democratic
   society.

Humanities today

Humanities in the United States

   Many American colleges and universities believe in the notion of a
   broad "liberal arts education", which places an emphasis on all college
   students studying the humanities in addition to their specific area of
   study. Prominent proponents of liberal arts in the United States have
   included Mortimer J. Adler and E.D. Hirsch.

   The 1980 United States Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities
   described the humanities in its report, The Humanities in American
   Life:

     Through the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question: What
     does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a
     complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral,
     spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality,
     despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth,
     friendship, hope, and reason.

   Criticism of the traditional humanities/liberal arts degree program has
   been leveled by many that see them as both expensive and relatively
   "useless" in the modern American job market, where several years of
   specialized study is required in many/most job fields. This is in
   direct contrast to the early 20th century when approximately 3% to 6%
   of the public at large had a university degree, and having one was a
   direct path to a professional life.

   After World War II, many millions of veterans took advantage of the GI
   Bill. Further expansion of federal education grants and loans have
   expanded the number of adults in the United States that have attended a
   college or university to be at least 60% of the population. As a
   consequence, degrees in such things as literature, art history,
   classics, etc, are no longer viewed as viable career path options by
   many. As a result, many graduates find themselves returning to school
   to earn another degree or waiting much longer than average to kick off
   their career successfully.

   Meanwhile, there are many changes and debates occurring today in the
   humanities:

Questioning distinctions

   The very concept of the ‘humanities’ as a class or kind, distinct from
   the ’sciences’, has come under repeated attack in the twentieth
   century. T.S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued
   that the forces driving scientific progress often have less to do with
   objective inference from unbiased observation than with much more
   value-laden sociological and cultural factors. More recently, Richard
   Rorty has argued that the distinction between the sciences and the
   humanities is harmful to both pursuits, placing the former on an
   undeserved pedestal and condemning the latter to irrationality. Rorty’s
   position requires a wholesale rejection of such traditional
   philosophical distinctions as those between appearance and reality,
   subjective and objective, replacing them with what he endorses as a new
   ‘fuzziness’. This leads to a kind of pragmatism where" the oppositions
   between the humanities, the arts, and the sciences, might gradually
   fade away... In this situation, ‘the humanities’ would no longer think
   of themselves as such...."

Modernism and postmodernism

   Vladimir Sorokin, Russian postmodernist writer
   Enlarge
   Vladimir Sorokin, Russian postmodernist writer

   In the United States, the late 20th century saw a challenge to the
   "elitism" of the humanities, which Edward Said has characterized as a
   "conservative philosophy of gentlemanly refinement, or sensibility."
   Such postmodernists argue that the humanities should go beyond the
   study of " dead white males" to include work by women and people of
   colour, and without religious bias. The French philosopher Michel
   Foucault has been a very influential part of this movement, stating in
   The Order of Things that "we can study only individuals, not human
   nature."

   However some in the humanities believe that such changes may be
   detrimental, as they lead to moral relativism and the concept that one
   person's interpretation is as good as any other. The literary critic
   Denis Donoghue suggests that modern criticism reduces the rich
   symbolism of a play like Macbeth to a simplistic "find the villain",
   with Lady Macbeth regarded as the victim of bloody-minded, power-mad
   masculine society; the result is said to be what E. D. Hirsch Jr.
   refers to as declining cultural literacy.

   The modernist considers that there is a canon of "great works" in
   literature and art which have an inherent quality, but the
   postmodernist argues that such ideas of greatness have been heavily
   biased by gender and culture. The modernist advocates close reading of
   a few works in literature, but the postmodernist generally favors more
   "extensive reading" of a large variety of works.

National institutions

   President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and
   Humanities Act in 1965 , creating the National Council on the
   Humanities and funded the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
   in 1969. NEH is an independent grant-making agency of the United States
   government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation,
   and public programs in the humanities.

   NEH facilitated the creation of State Humanities Councils in the 56
   U.S. states and territories. Each council operates independently,
   defining the "humanities" in relationship to the disciplines, subjects,
   and values valued in the regions they serve. Councils give grant funds
   to individuals, scholars, and nonprofit organizations dedicated to the
   humanities in their region. Councils also offer diverse programs and
   services that respond to the needs of their communities and according
   to their own definitions of the humanities.

Humanities in the digital age

   Language and literature are considered to lie at the heart of the
   humanities, so the impact of electronic communication is of great
   concern to those in the field. The immediacy of modern technology and
   the internet speeds up communication, but may threaten "deferred" forms
   of communication such as literature and "dumb down" language. The
   library is also changing rapidly as bookshelves are replaced by
   computer terminals. The humanities will have to adapt rapidly to these
   changes, though it is unlikely that the traditional pen and paper will
   disappear altogether.

Terminology

     * Scholars working in the humanities are sometimes described as
       humanists. But that term also describes the philosophical position
       of humanism, which some antihumanist scholars in the humanities
       reject.

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