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Cursus: OGMV05006
OGMV05006
History, Role and Impact of the Humanities
Cursus informatie
CursuscodeOGMV05006
Studiepunten (EC)7,5
Cursusdoelen
Students will develop the ability to understand the nature of 'permanent crisis' in the humanities and social sciences and take a stand in these debates; develop their critical abilities and academic attitude of wonder; master oral and written presentations in front of critical audiences.
Inhoud
The growth and specialization of science has led to the gap between the anciens et modernes, between Humanities and Natural Sciences and ultimately to the establishment of two separate worlds: the world of numbers and the world of language. Not only do many of the themes in Humanities scholarship fall outside the Natural Sciences, the two are often in conflict. After all, many artworks are based on obsolete concepts from the Natural Sciences. This course reconsiders the statute of the Humanities, surveys its history since the 16th century, compares its methods and techniques with those of the Natural Sciences, and asks why the Humanities have continuously been seen as an endangered species since they were formally established as a university discipline in the nineteenth century.
In the course three topics will be studied in depth. Firstly; the creation of critical humanism as a founding discipline in the late 16th and early seventeenth centuries. Emphasis will be on the work of Joseph Scaliger and Pierre Bayle, who both claimed that a historically founded analysis of texts would yield the same level of truth as mathematics did. Secondly, we will focus on the Rickert-Dilthey-Windelband debates in Germany and Europe at the turn of the 19th century, who all thought to have re-established a firm epistomological basis for the humanities. Finally we will concentrate on the postmodern crisis of the humanities in the last two decades of the 20th century. Connecting element will be the status of knowledge produced by research in the humanities and its relationship with politics and religion. While studying these topics ample time will be devoted to the question: what does a practitioner of the humanities, i.c. an historian, actually do. Visits to archives and libraries, the laboratories of the historian, will be part of the course.

Students will be familiar with the general historical development of the humanities. Students will be able to recognize and contextualize the social orientations, types of institutionalization and scientific methods within the humanities. Students will get a view of the relationship with neighbouring fields in the sciences and with unfamiliar scientific and scholarly traditions. They will also learn how to deal with the cultural issues, social expectations and political pressure that characterizes the practice of the humanities.

Students History and Philosophy of Science, for registration please contact your programme coordinator during the enrolment period.
 
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