Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 129.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2023-06-26 08:56:28+00:00
From: Manfred Thaller <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.127: science and the humanities?
Dear Willard,
I have no direct answer to your question, indeed I'd rather attach a
question on my own to it: how was the term / concept "Humanities"
introduced into the English language?
I ask this, as in German "Geisteswissenschaften" (emphatically also a
plural) is an intentionally invented neologism of the 19th century. In a
situation, where the expanding hard sciences presented a seemingly
unified understanding of their communalities to the academic (and the
academia funding political) world, he started to define what the
communalities of the "other half" would be. To find a term for the
not-so-hard-sciences he writes: “/Ich schließe mich dem Sprachgebrauch
derjenigen Denker an, welche diese andere Hälfte des globus
intellectualis als Geisteswissenschaften////bezeichnen/.” (“I follow the
usage of those thinkers who call this
other half of the /globus intellectualis Geisteswissenschaften/.“)
[[Wilhelm Dilthey: /Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften/, vol. I,
Teubner, 1922 (= /Wilhelm Diltheys Gesammelte Schriften/, vol. I)
originally published 1883. The quote is from p. 5.]]
So at least in German, the "/Geisteswissenschaften/" are ultimately a
defensive concept, their hermeneutics formulated as a unifying framework
which could stand against the seemingly self-evident unity of the hard
sciences. (Unified by mathematics, even if that is not emphasized
particularly by Dilthey.)
I'd appreciate very much, if anybody could point to a detailed treatment
which clarifies, whether the term "humanities" has arisen from a similar
process.
Best,
Manfred
PS: A bit more detail on the first pages of my
https://www.academia.edu/78848177/On_Hermeneutics_And_Computing
Am 26.06.23 um 09:17 schrieb Humanist:
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 127.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to:humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2023-06-26 07:14:38+00:00
> From: Willard McCarty<willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
> Subject: science and the humanities
>
> What we do in 'digital humanities' is dependent on a technoscientific
> device, a computational machine, though only some of us are interested
> in that dependency. However much we skirt around our relation to the
> natural sciences, it's there to be considered. Some, like me, would even
> say that we must consider and more it to know what we're doing.
>
> But here's a complication. Despite the learned arguments by Peter
> Galison et al. concerning the Disunity of Science (the title of a book
> he did with David J. Stump (Stanford, 1996), we still refer to 'science'
> in the singular, as they did, and as Emil Toescu and Ádám Tuboly do in
> an issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews about to be published. But
> we always refer to 'the humanities' in the plural; 'humanity' is
> something rather different. This difference complicates because it
> allows the unity of the natural sciences to remain a robust idea despite
> their huge diversity. The plurality of 'the humanities' does the opposite.
>
> Comments?
>
> Yours,
> WM
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk
--
Prof.em.Dr. Manfred Thaller
formerly University at Cologne /
zuletzt Universität zu Köln
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