I read some interesting notes about the significance of the humanities in today’s world (from a Harvard panel gathered in May 2013).
Stefan Collini, a literature professor at Cambridge University: Worry over the humanities, he said, is a “placeholder for anxieties” about the fate of universities at large, whose traditional role — creating knowledge for the sake of knowledge — is increasingly under fire in a utilitarian world.
Sheldon Pollock, a South Asian studies professor at Columbia University: In a world now so focused on solving problems, it is the business of the humanities to make problems, by asking ontological and even existential questions. The result, he said, is that in the universities of today, “humanists are typically pushed right to the margins.”
Also, the field/idea of philology fascinates me. Some ideas from James Turner’s “Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities”
- For centuries, “philology” was synonymous with humanistic intellectual life and all studies of language of literature.
- Philology may be defined broadly as a penchant for close reading of texts, for discerning patterns and relationships across languages and cultures and for illuminating the historical milieu that produces a work of art or literature.
- Philology literally means “love of words” or “love of learning.”