Humanities

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The humanities are academic disciplines that study human culture. The humanities use methods
that are primarily critical, or speculative, and have a significant historical element[1]as distinguished
from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences.[1] The humanities include ancient and
modern languages, literature, philosophy, religion, and visual and performing arts such
as music andtheatre. The humanities that are also sometimes regarded as social
sciences include history, anthropology, area studies, communication studies, cultural
studies, law and linguistics.
Scholars in the humanities are "humanities scholars" or humanists.[2] The term "humanist" also
describes the philosophical position ofhumanism, which some "antihumanist" scholars in the
humanities refuse. The Renaissance scholars and artists were also calledhumanists.
Some secondary schools offer humanities classes, usually consisting of English literature, global
studies, and art.
Human disciplines like history, cultural anthropology, and psychoanalysis study subject matters that
the experimental method does not apply toand instead mainly use the comparative
method[3] and comparative research

Fields[edit]

Classics[edit]

Bust of Homer, a Greek poet

The classics, in the Western academic tradition, refer to cultures of classical antiquity, namely the
Ancient Greek and Roman cultures. The study of the classics is considered one of the cornerstones

of the humanities; however, its popularity declined during the 20th century. Nevertheless, the
influence of classical ideas in many humanities disciplines, such as philosophy and literature,
remains strong; for example, the Gilgamesh Epic from Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Book of the
Dead, the Vedas and Upanishads in India and various writings attributed
to Confucius, Laozi and Zhuangzi in China.

History[edit]
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, societies, institutions,
and any topic that has changed over time.
Traditionally, the study of history has been considered a part of the humanities. In
modern academia, history is occasionally classified as a social science.

Languages[edit]
While the scientific study of language is known as linguistics and is generally considered a social
science[4] or a cognitive science,[5] the study of languages is still central to the humanities. A good
deal of twentieth-century and twenty-first-century philosophy has been devoted to the analysis of
language and to the question of whether, as Wittgenstein claimed, many of our philosophical
confusions derive from the vocabulary we use; literary theory has explored the rhetorical,
associative, and ordering features of language; and historical linguists have studied the development
of languages across time. 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.

Law[edit]

A trial at a criminal court, the Old Bailey in London

Main article: Law

In common parlance, law means a rule that (unlike a rule of ethics) is enforceable through
institutions.[6] The study of law crosses the boundaries between the social sciences and humanities,
depending on one's view of research into its objectives and effects. Law is not always enforceable,
especially in the international relations context. It has been defined as a "system of rules",[7] as an
"interpretive concept"[8] to achieve justice, as an "authority"[9] to mediate people's interests, and even
as "the command of a sovereign, backed by the threat of a sanction".[10] However one likes to think
of law, it is a completely central social institution. Legal policy incorporates the practical
manifestation of thinking from almost every social science and discipline of the humanities. Laws
are politics, because politicians create them. Law is philosophy, because moral and ethical
persuasions shape their ideas. Law tells many of history's stories, because statutes, case law and
codifications build up over time. And law is economics, because any rule
about contract, tort, property law, labour law, company law and many more can have long lasting
effects. The noun law derives from the late Old English lagu, meaning something laid down or
fixed[11] and the adjective legal comes from the Latin word lex.[12]

Literature[edit]
Main article: Literature

Shakespeare wrote some of the most acclaimed works in English literature.

Literature is a term that does not have a universally accepted definition, but which has variably
included all written work; writing that possesses literary merit; and language that foregrounds
literariness, as opposed to ordinary language. Etymologically the term derives
from Latin literatura/litteratura "writing formed with letters", although some definitions include spoken
or sung texts. Literature can be classified according to whether it is fiction or non-fiction, and whether
it is poetry or prose; it can be further distinguished according to major forms such as the novel, short
story or drama; and works are often categorised according to historical periods, or according to their
adherence to certain aesthetic features or expectations (genre).

Performing arts[edit]
The performing arts differ from the plastic arts in so far as the former uses the artist's own body,
face, and 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, film, magic, music, opera, 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, andsingers. Performing arts are also supported by
workers in related fields, such as songwriting and stagecraft. Performers often adapt
theirappearance, 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[edit]

Concert in the Mozarteum, Salzburg

Music as an academic discipline can take a number of different paths, including

music performance, music education (training music teachers), musicology, ethnomusicology, music
theory and composition. Undergraduate music majors generally take courses in all of these areas,

while graduate students focus on a particular path. In the liberal arts tradition, music is also used to
broaden skills of non-musicians by teaching skills such as concentration and listening.
Theatre[edit]
Theatre (or theater) (Greek "theatron", ) 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[edit]
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), and motion in inanimate objects (the leaves danced in
the wind). Choreography is the art of creating 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.

Philosophy[edit]

The works of Sren Kierkegaardoverlap into many fields of the humanities, such as philosophy, literature, theology,
music, and classical studies.

Philosophy etymologically, the "love of wisdom" is generally the study of problems concerning
matters such as existence, knowledge, justification, truth, justice, right and wrong, beauty, validity,
mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these issues by its
critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned argument, rather than
experiments (experimental philosophy being an exception).[13]
Philosophy used to be a very comprehensive term, including what have subsequently become
separate disciplines, such as physics. (AsImmanuel Kant noted, "Ancient Greek philosophy was
divided into three sciences: physics, ethics, and logic.")[14] Today, the main fields of philosophy
are logic, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Still, it continues to overlap with other disciplines.
The field of semantics, for example, brings philosophy into contact with linguistics.
Since the early twentieth century, philosophy in English-speaking universities has become much
more analytic. Analytic philosophy is marked by emphasis on the use of logic and formal methods of
reasoning, conceptual analysis, and the use of symbolic and/ormathematical logic), as contrasted
with the Continental style of philosophy.[15] This method of inquiry is largely indebted to the work of
philosophers such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Religion[edit]

The compass in this 13th-century manuscript is a symbol of God's act ofcreation.

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, Sikhism, Jainism,
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, where he is described as a prophet (Genesis 20:7), and in the Quran, where
he also appears as a prophet. This forms a large group of related largely monotheistic religions,
generally held to include Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and comprises over half of the world's
religious adherents.

Visual arts[edit]
History of visual arts[edit]

Quatrain on Heavenly Mountain byEmperor Gaozong (11071187) ofSong Dynasty; fan mounted as album leaf on
silk, four columns in cursive script.

The great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of the ancient civilizations, such
as Ancient Japan, Greece and Rome,China, Pakistan,Greater
Nepal, Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica.
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 (e.g., 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.
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[16] and of unseen psychology by Freud,[17] but also by
unprecedented technological development. Increasing global interaction during this time saw an
equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art.
Media types[edit]
Drawing[edit]
Drawing is a means of making a picture, using any of a wide variety of tools and techniques. It
generally involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, or moving a tool
across a surface. Common tools are graphite pencils, pen and ink, inkedbrushes, wax color
pencils, crayons, charcoals, pastels, and markers. Digital tools that simulate the effects of these are
also used. The main techniques used in drawing are: line drawing, hatching, crosshatching, random
hatching, scribbling, stippling, and blending. An artist who excels in drawing is referred to as
a draftsman or draughtsman.
Painting[edit]

The Mona Lisa is one of the most recognizable artistic paintings in theWestern world.

Painting taken literally is the practice of applying pigment suspended in a carrier (or medium) and a
binding agent (a glue) to a surface(support) such as paper, canvas or a wall. However, when used in
an artistic sense it means the use of this activity in combination withdrawing, composition and other
aesthetic considerations in order to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the
practitioner. Painting is also used to express spiritual motifs and ideas; sites of this kind of painting
range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery to The Sistine Chapel to the human
body itself.
Colour is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from
one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but elsewhere white may be.
Some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe,Kandinsky, Isaac Newton,
have written their own colour theories. Moreover the use of language is only a generalization for a
colour equivalent. The word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations on the pure red
of the spectrum. There is not a formalized register of different colours in the way that there is
agreement on different notes in music, such as C or C# in music, although the Pantonesystem is
widely used in the printing and design industry for this purpose.
Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, for example, collage.
This began with cubism and is not painting in strict sense. Some modern painters incorporate
different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the
works of [] or Anselm Kiefer. Modern and contemporary art has moved away from the historic value

of craft in favour of concept; this has led some[who?] to say that painting, as a serious art form, is
dead, although this has not deterred the majority of artists from continuing to practise it either as
whole or part of their work.

Origin of the term[edit]

The word "humanities" is derived from the Renaissance Latin expression studia humanitatis, or
"study of humanitas" (a classical Latin word meaningin addition to "humanity" -- "culture,
refinement, education" and, specifically, an "education befitting a cultivated man"). In its usage in the
early 15th century, the studia humanitatis was a course of studies that consisted of grammar, poetry,
rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy, primarily derived from the study of Latin and Greek classics.
The word humanitas also gave rise to the Renaissance Italian neologism umanisti, whence
"humanist", "Renaissance humanism".[18]

History[edit]
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 artsevolved,
involving grammar, rhetoric and logic (the trivium), along
with arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music (the quadrivium).[19] These subjects formed the bulk
ofmedieval education, with the emphasis being on the humanities as skills or "ways of doing."
A major shift occurred with the Renaissance humanism of the fifteenth century, when the humanities
began to be regarded as subjects to study rather than practice, with a corresponding shift away from
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.[20]

Today[edit]

In the United States[edit]

Main article: Humanities in the United States
The Humanities Indicators[edit]
The Humanities Indicators, unveiled in 2009 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, are the
first comprehensive compilation of data about the humanities in the United States, providing
scholars, policymakers and the public with detailed information on humanities education from
primary to higher education, the humanities workforce, humanities funding and research, and public
humanities activities.[21][22] Modeled after the National Science Boards Science and Engineering
Indicators, the Humanities Indicators are a source of reliable benchmarks to guide analysis of the
state of the humanities in the United States.

If "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth,"[23] statements about a "crisis" in the humanities are also misleading
and ignore data of the sort collected by the Humanities Indicators.[24][25]
The Humanities in American Life[edit]
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 where irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death
are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope, and reason.
In liberal arts education[edit]
The Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences 2013 report The Heart of the
Matter supports the notion of a broad "liberal arts education," which includes study in disciplines from
the natural sciences to the arts as well as the humanities.[26][27]
Many colleges provide such an education; some require it. The University of Chicago and Columbia
University were among the first schools to require an extensive core curriculum in philosophy,
literature, and the arts for all students.[28] Other colleges with nationally recognized, mandatory
programs in the liberal arts are St. John's College, Saint Anselm College and Providence College.
Prominent proponents of liberal arts in the United States have included Mortimer J. Adler[29] and E.
D. Hirsch, Jr..
In the digital age[edit]
Researchers in the humanities have developed numerous large- and small-scale digital corpora,
such as digitized collections of historical texts, along with the digital tools and methods to analyze
them. Their aim is both to uncover new knowledge about corpora and to visualize research data in
new and revealing ways. Much of this activity occurs in a field called the Digital Humanities.

Philosophical history[edit]

Citizenship and self-reflection[edit]

Since the late 19th century, a central justification for the humanities has been that it aids and
encourages self-reflectiona self-reflection that, in turn, helps develop personal consciousness or
an active sense of civic duty.
Wilhelm Dilthey and Hans-Georg Gadamer centered the humanities attempt to distinguish itself from
the natural sciences in humankinds urge to understand its own experiences. This understanding,
they claimed, ties like-minded people from similar cultural backgrounds together and provides a
sense of cultural continuity with the philosophical past.[30]

Scholars in the late 20th and early 21st centuries extended that narrative imagination[31] to the
ability to understand the records of lived experiences outside of ones own individual social and
cultural context. Through that narrative imagination, it is claimed, humanities scholars and students
develop a conscience more suited to the multicultural world we live in.[32] That conscience might take
the form of a passive one that allows more effective self-reflection[33] or extend into active empathy
that facilitates the dispensation of civic duties a responsible world citizen must engage in.[32] There is
disagreement, however, on the level of influence humanities study can have on an individual and
whether or not the understanding produced in humanistic enterprise can guarantee an identifiable
positive effect on people.[34]

Truth and meaning[edit]

The divide between humanistic study and natural sciences informs arguments of meaning in
humanities as well. What distinguishes the humanities from the natural sciences is not a certain
subject matter, but rather the mode of approach to any question. Humanities focuses on
understanding meaning, purpose, and goals and furthers the appreciation of singular historical and
social phenomenaan interpretive method of finding truthrather than explaining the causality of
events or uncovering the truth of the natural world.[35] Apart from its societal application, narrative
imagination is an important tool in the (re)production of understood meaning in history, culture and
literature.
Imagination, as part of the tool kit of artists or scholars, helps create meaning that invokes a
response from an audience. Since a humanities scholar is always within the nexus of lived
experiences, no "absolute" knowledge is theoretically possible; knowledge is instead a ceaseless
procedure of inventing and reinventing the context a text is read in.Poststructuralism has
problematized an approach to the humanistic study based on questions of meaning, intentionality,
and authorship.[dubious discuss] In the wake of the death of the author proclaimed by Roland Barthes,
various theoretical currents such as deconstruction and discourse analysis seek to expose the
ideologies and rhetoric operative in producing both the purportedly meaningful objects and
the hermeneutic subjects of humanistic study. This exposure has opened up the interpretive
structures of the humanities to criticism humanities scholarship is unscientific and therefore unfit for
inclusion in modern university curricula because of the very nature of its changing contextual
meaning.[dubious discuss]

Pleasure, the pursuit of knowledge and scholarship[edit]

Some, like Stanley Fish, have claimed that the humanities can defend themselves best by refusing
to make any claims of utility.[36] (Fish may well be thinking primarily of literary study, rather than
history and philosophy.) Any attempt to justify the humanities in terms of outside benefits such as
social usefulness (say increased productivity) or in terms of ennobling effects on the individual (such
as greater wisdom or diminished prejudice) is ungrounded, according to Fish, and simply places

impossible demands on the relevant academic departments. Furthermore, critical thinking, while
arguably a result of humanistic training, can be acquired in other contexts.[37] And the humanities do
not even provide any more the kind of social cachet (what sociologists sometimes call "cultural
capital") that was helpful to succeed in Western society before the age of mass education following
World War II.
Instead, scholars like Fish suggest that the humanities offer a unique kind of pleasure, a pleasure
based on the common pursuit of knowledge (even if it is only disciplinary knowledge). Such pleasure
contrasts with the increasing privatization of leisure[citation needed] and instant gratification characteristic
of Western culture; it thus meets Jrgen Habermas requirements for the disregard of social status
and rational problematization of previously unquestioned areas necessary for an endeavor which
takes place in the bourgeois public sphere. In this argument, then, only the academic pursuit of
pleasure can provide a link between the private and the public realm in modern Western consumer
society and strengthen that public sphere that, according to many theorists,[who?] is the foundation for
modern democracy.[citation needed]

Romanticization and rejection[edit]

Implicit in many of these arguments supporting the humanities are the makings of arguments against
public support of the humanities. Joseph Carroll asserts that we live in a changing world, a world
where "cultural capital" is replaced with scientific literacy, and in which the romantic notion of a
Renaissance humanities scholar is obsolete. Such arguments appeal to judgments and anxieties
about the essential uselessness of the humanities, especially in an age when it is seemingly vitally
important for scholars of literature, history and the arts to engage in "collaborative work with
experimental scientists or even simply to make "intelligent use of the findings from empirical
science."[38] The notion that 'in today's day and age,' with its focus on the ideals of efficiency and
practical utility, scholars of the humanities are becoming obsolete was perhaps summed up most
powerfully in a remark that has been attributed to the artificial intelligence specialist Marvin Minsky:
With all the money that we are throwing away on humanities and art - give me that money and I will
build you to be a better student."[39]
This section possibly contains original research. Please improve
it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements
consisting only of original research should be removed. (May 2012)

Minsky's faith in the superiority of technical knowledge and his reduction of the humanities scholar of
today to an obsolete relic of the past supported by the tax dollars of romantics fondly recalling the
days of the G.I. Bill echoes arguments put forth by scholars and cultural commentators that call
themselves "post-humanists" or "transhumanists." The idea is that current trends in the scientific
understanding of human beings are calling the basic category of "the human" into question.

Examples of these trends are assertions by cognitive scientists that the mind is simply a computing
device,[40] by geneticists that human beings are no more than ephemeral husks used by selfpropagating genes (or even memes or norms, according to some postmodern linguists), or
by bioengineers who claim that one day it may be both possible and desirable to create humananimal hybrids[citation needed]. Rather than engage with old-style humanist
scholarship, transhumanists in particular tend to be more concerned with testing and altering the
limits of our mental and physical capacities in fields such as cognitive science and bioengineering in
order to transcend the essentially bodily limitations that have bounded humanity. Despite the
criticism of humanities scholarship as obsolete, however, many of the most influential post-humanist
works are profoundly engaged with film and literary criticism,history, and cultural studies as can be
seen in the writings of Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. And in recent years there has been
a spate of books and articles re-articulating the importance of humanistic study. Examples include:
Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (2001), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of
Presence (2004), Frank B. Farrell, Why Does Literature Matter? (2004), John Carey, What Good Are
the Arts? (2006), Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction (2006), Alexander Nehamas, Only A Promise
Of Happiness (2007), Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (2008), Adam Gopnick Why Teach and Study
English? (2013)...

The Humanities and its Disciplines. The humanities are academic

disciplines that seek to understand, appreciate and critique the
human conduction in all its depth and range of meaning. They, in
varied ways, consider the "big questions," both of the contemporary
and the perennial, and with these understandings and
methodologies engage civic life, both locally and globally, to address
the challenges faced by humanity.
While there are many other disciplines that also seek to understand
the human condition, the approaches and methodologies of the
humanities are primarily interpretive (analytical, critical, and/or
reflective), as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of
the natural and social sciences, and the creative approaches in the
arts.
The second distinction is in what the humanities then attempt to do
with the knowledge generated, in the application of understanding.
The Idaho Humanities Council goes on to say, through [the] study

[of the humanities it seeks to] yield wisdom. As written in the 1965
National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act which
established the National Endowment for the Humanities and all the
state councils, Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its
citizens. Wisdom is that deep understanding that goes beyond
knowing to application, engaging civic life, both locally and globally,
to address the challenges faced by humanity. To take up the big
questions.
In his keynote address, Gary Williams, my predecessor in this role of
Distinguished Humanities Professor, emphasized that the
Humanities are . . . a way of thinking about and responding to the
world tools we use to examine and make sense of the human
experience in general and our individual experiences in particular.
The humanities enable us to reflect upon our lives and ask
fundamental questions of value, purpose, and meaning in a rigorous
and systematic way (Massachusetts Foundation for the
Humanities). As the 1965 Congressional Act stressed, the term
'humanities' pays particular attention to our diverse heritage,
traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the
current conditions of national life" . . . . to both the particular and
diverse, as well as the national and general shared in common.
Attempting to address the big questions.
The humanities disciplines typically include
anthropology/ethnography, communications studies, cultural
studies (such as American, Black, International, Latin American,
Native American, Religious, Women's Studies), languages, law,
literature, history, philosophy, and reflection and theory in creative
writing, in the performing arts of music, dance and theatre, and in
the visual arts of painting, sculpting and architecture.
According to the 1965 National Foundation on the Arts and the
Humanities Act, "The term 'humanities' includes, but is not limited
to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical;
linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy;
archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and
theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have
humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study

and application of the humanities to the human environment with

particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and
history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current
conditions of national life" (emphasis added), to both the unique
and diverse as well as the national and shared in common. (from
National Endowment for the Humanities
website, http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/overview.html).