Review of Ricardo Nirenberg's "The Long Agony of the Humanities"

Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology, 2022

What does deep time thinking mean for the humanities? Given that human life appears to fade into relative insignificance when considered on such vast time scales, how are disciplines that focus on the time bound histories, cultures, and religions of humanity to respond? Conversely, given the immense ecological devastation that human beings are currently causing, what role can the humanities play in encouraging a humbler temporal perspective? Might the humanities even enable us to internalise deep time in a way that the more abstract sciences cannot? This special issue of Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology brings together an array of voices on the impact of deep time thinking in the humanities. It arises from a one-day conference on this topic, which was hosted by the Environmental Humanities Network at The Oxford Research Centre int he Humanities (torch) in June 2021.

While histories within the context of a single humanities discipline have been written for more than a century, it is only over the last decade that we have witnessed histories that go beyond single humanities disciplines and that bring together different fields, periods or regions. It thus comes as a surprise that virtually no studies go into the methodological problems of the new métier. Questions abound: What do we mean by “bringing together” different humanities fields across time and space? Should we study their shared concepts, methods, virtues, research practices, historical actors, pedagogical practices, personal interactions, or yet something else? And when in history can we speak of the “humanities” as a group of disciplines? And how can we compare the humanities from different parts of the world? In this essay, I will discuss four methodological challenges which I believe to be constitutive for the history of the humanities as a field. These are the challenges of demarcation, anachronism, eurocentrism and incommensurability. Any history of the humanities that goes beyond the scope of a single discipline, period or region will have to address at least one of these challenges. While none of my challenges have absolute solutions, I will give a motivated choice for each of them. I will argue that my solutions provide a viable way to write a comparative history of the humanities, and that we can therefore speak of them as maxims. Although the preferred solutions will differ among historians, the challenges remain the same. At the end of my essay, I will discuss other possible solutions to the challenges, as well as other possible challenges for the history of the humanities, such as the challenge of forgotten scholars, non-academic humanities and colonial humanities. Finally, I will go into the relation between the history of the humanities and the history of science and knowledge.

Teksty Drugie, 2015

International Congress Imagine There Were No Humanities, Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, 9-10/06/2015

Academia Letters, 2021

Philosophy

In this paper I aim to state the nature of the humanities, contrasting them with the natural sciences. I argue that, compared with the natural sciences, the humanities have their own objects, their own aims, and their own methods.

Writing the History of the Humanities: Questions, Themes and Approaches, 2022

In 2016, the opening issue of the journal History of Humanities proudly announced that a new field of research was in the process of emerging. Although humanities scholars had always engaged with the histories of their own disciplines, what was new and exciting, according to the journal editors, was that they had begun to broaden their horizons. If humanities scholars had been used to studying the history of French linguistics or Chinese historiography in relative isolation from other fields, they now began to raise comparative questions. How had Fernand de Saussure’s structuralism resonated in disciplines other than linguistics? To what extent had source critical methods been adopted across the humanities? And how is it to be explained that some humanities fields have been more receptive to postcolonial critique than others? The history of the humanities as envisioned by the journal editors thus appears as something more than an umbrella term for the history of linguistics, the history of historiography, and the history of art history. Typical for the field is its “ambition to write comparative historiographies of the humanities.” Historians of the humanities are scholars traversing across fields, through all of the humanities (and beyond), with the aim of understanding what the humanities have been, what they are today, and why they are important.

THE NEW INSTITUTE.Interventions

What role can the humanities play in shaping our common future? What are the values that guide us in the 21st century? How can we unleash the potential the humanities offer in a time of multiple crises? This volume tackles some of these fundamental questions, acknowledging and developing the changing role of academic discourse in a turbulent world. This timely book argues that the humanities engender conceptual tools that are capable of reconciling theory and practice. In a bold move, we call for the humanities to reach beyond the confines of universities and engage in the most urgent debates facing humanity today - in a multidisciplinary, transformative, and constructive way. This is a blueprint for how societal change can be inclusive and equitable for the good of humans and non-humans alike.

These are exciting times for the humanities. The impressive corpus of knowledge that the humanities have discovered, created, and cultivated over many centuries is available for the benefit of more people than ever and evolving rapidly. Fresh perspectives open up as digital tools enable researchers to explore questions that not long ago were beyond their reach and even their imagination. Novel fields of research deal with phenomena emerging in a globalizing culture, enabling us to make sense of the way in which new media affect our lives. Cross-fertilization between disciplines leads to newly developed methods and results, such as the complex chemical analysis of the materials of ancient artworks, yielding data that were unavailable to both artists and their publics at the time of production, or neuroscientific experiments shedding new light on our capacity for producing and appreciating music. At the same time, there is a sense of gloom, perhaps even crisis, among those who are convinced that the humanities are valuable, precious, indispensable. The number of students taking humanities courses declines, and humanities departments at universities worldwide are subject to severe budget cuts or abolition altogether. In a period in which the academic world is plagued by governments insisting on measurable results for the sake of short-term financial profit, the humanities seem most vulnerable. We present the first issue of History of Humanities with feelings of anticipation. Our journal is meant to stand for the fact that scholarly practices of a type today labeled " humanities " have been an essential part of the process of knowledge making ever since human inquisitiveness sought to enhance our understanding of the world and ourselves. This long history has been studied in fruitful and illuminating ways, but the focus has been on either the natural sciences or on single disciplines within the humanities, such as history writing and linguistics. The fundamental contribution of the humanities to the intricate web of knowledge that scholars, thinkers, and researchers have spun in the course of several millennia has thus been poorly recognized and is consequently undervalued. We intend to redress the imbalance in the historiography of the search for knowledge that mankind has been engaged in for so long.