CoursesCourse 23
The humanities and the social sciences: an introduction
What is the use of the humanities? This course begins with a bold picture of how people think, in nested layers from the humanistic to the commercial, and follows it through the history of the word “humanities,” the case for useless knowledge, and the two poverties that come from seeing too narrowly.
Start lesson 1Lessons
- 1 Four layers of thoughtA picture of thinking as nested layers, like the layers of the Earth, and a claim that “cognition,” the loop from seeing to doing, is where humanistic thinking begins.
- 2 Where the word comes fromFrom a line in the Book of Changes and a defense of a poet in a Roman court to the manuscript hunters of the Renaissance: how “the humanities” got its name, and what it has meant.
- 3 The use of the uselessA tree no carpenter would cut, an institute with no students, and the old argument that the things with no use are the ones we can least afford to lose.
- 4 Two poverties, and the eye beyond the eyeScientists who dismiss novels and writers who dismiss physics: C. P. Snow’s two cultures, the Venice parable, and a talk about blind Cupid and the five eyes of Buddhism.
You’ll be able to
- Describe the four-layer picture of thinking (humanistic, scientific, technological, commercial) and say which parts of it are this course’s argument and which are established history.
- Explain what “cognition” means as the starting point of humanistic thinking, and why the same input can lead to different action.
- Trace the word “humanities” from the Book of Changes and Cicero through the Renaissance studia humanitatis to Dilthey and Cassirer.
- Give the best arguments for and against the usefulness of useless knowledge, and explain what C. P. Snow meant by two cultures and what his critics said.
About this course
This course covers 人文社会学导论 (Introduction to the Humanities and the Social Sciences). It opens the humanities strand of Dao Academy. Despite its title, it is mostly about the humanities and about humanistic thinking; the social sciences appear as neighbors, in Wilhelm Dilthey’s “human sciences,” in C. P. Snow’s “third culture,” and in Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology.
The argument is an essayist’s, and it is bold: it claims that humanistic thinking is the widest frame that science, technology, and business all sit inside. We keep that argument and mark it as an argument (“in this reading”), separate from the history it uses, which we have checked against sources. Where the history is more complicated, or scholars disagree, we say so, and each lesson has an “Another view.” Earlier courses prepare some of the ground: Course 1 asks what science is for, Course 2 asks how learning that was useless on purpose became useful and follows it into the medieval university, and Course 10 studies how minds actually decide.