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How the Humanities Changed the World
Or why we should stop worrying and love the
history of the humanities
Rens Bod University of Amsterdam
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation
Let’s start with a small survey
Which disciplines changed the world more
profoundly?
(1) The Humanities
(2) The Sciences
The humanities are under great
pressure world-wide
Humanities are increasingly marginalized and are viewed by policy makers as useless for technology and economy
Most reactions are defensive: Critical mind and cultural awareness
Bildung (self-cultivation)
Social responsibility (E. Said)
Democratic consiousness (M. Nussbaum)
It is often forgotten that the humanities have led to world-changing insights and discoveries
The humanities should guard
themselves against misconceptions
Insights in the humanities have been attributed to the sciences – also by humanities scholars!
Academic institutes, students and scholars have a responsibility to show the relevance of the humanities – even if just to survive themselves..
The comparative history of the humanities is of great
help here
The history of the humanities is
largely uninvestigated
E.g. Dutch minister of Science, Culture and
Education, Ronald Plasterk, claimed:
“The humanities write history,
but the sciences make history”
Is he right or wrong?
Definition of ‘humanities’
W. Dilthey (1911):
“The humanities study the expressions of the
human mind”
such as the study of music, language, art,
literature, theater, texts…
In 21st century there are many different ways
to investigate expressions of the human mind
Not only historical and hermeneutic methods but
also digital methods
Humanities vs natural sciences
and social sciences
Natural sciences study nature
Physics, astronomy,
chemistry, biology,
Social sciences study human behavior in their
social environment
Psychology, sociology,
anthropology, economics…
What is this talk about?
These are my main questions:
In what way did insights from the humanities change the world?
And where do the preconceptions about the humanities come from? Such as: “The humanities are a luxury without
economic impact”
I will guide you through 25 centuries of history in 25 minutes… We should keep in mind that humanities are seen as
separate branch of disciplines only since 19th century
Linguistics: notion of
“Grammar” (600 BCE)
One of the most important discoveries of all time is the notion of rule-based system for human language, a ‘grammar’
A finite number of rules describes all infinitely many correct (‘grammatical’) sentences
The Indian linguist Panini developed in 6th century BCE such a rule-based system for Sanskrit using the notion of Recursion
+voc +len /- +voc +savarNa
rAma-s- + ShaShTha rAma-Sh-ShaShTha
ya-t- + nAsti ya-n-nAsti etc.
Recursion is known as the “Droste effect”
The impact of the notion of
‘Recursion’
Thanks to recursion, a finite number of rules can cover a infinite number of sentences
E.g. the sentence: I see the man that hits the cat that is chased by the dog that is spotted by the photographer that is…
i.e. the rule for subclauses is used in the rule for subclauses itself: one can go deeper and deeper using recursion
Panini’s grammar-formalism was used as a model
for first higher-level programming languages ALGOL60, Panini-Backus Normal Form
Panini’s formalism made ICT formally and technologically possible!
Music theory:
Pythagoras (6th c. BCE)
Pythagoras not only investigated mathematics
but also music perception
His discovery: harmonic intervals
(‘consonances’) coincide with simple number
ratios: octave=1/2, fifth=2/3, fourth=3/4
According to Pythagoras the third was not consonant
(but since late middle ages, the third is perceived as
consonant)
“Mind and nature consist of
numbers”
Pythagoras’s idea to describe musical harmony in terms of numbers (which Aristoxenus extended to musical melodies) may have had an even greater impact than the discovery of ‘grammar’
Led to the insight that the world
(both mind and nature) can be understood
bu numbers: e.g. Harmony of the Spheres
This world view emerged from the Study of Music which for a long time was seen as cosmological
Philology: Lorenzo Valla’s
‘discovery’ (1440)
Philology: on the basis of correspondences and differences (errors) in variants of transmitted texts the original (archetype) can be reconstructed
The philologist Lorenzo Valla shows in 1440 that the document “Donatio Constantini” (“The Donation of Constantine”) is a forgery
According to this document the Roman emperor Constantine would have donated the West-Roman empire in the early 4th c. to the Pope!
Impact of Valla’s discovery
Valla’s discovery caused an enormous shock in 15th and 16th century Europe
It was taken up by Luther and
and others and was one of the
motives for the Reformation
The very idea of philological source reconstruction (Poliziano, Bentley, Lachmann a.o.) by figuring out the errors in transmission even influenced biology centuries later (i.e. DNA analysis – see Dawkins 2008)
Underlying idea of source
reconstruction
When there is an error in a copied document – e.g. a missing word – then descendents of the document will have the same common errors
Thus all variants with a certain error can be traced
back to a common ancestor where this error occurred for the first time
If there are more common errors, a genealogical family tree can be constructed, a stemma
Example of a stemma
Common errors point at common
ancestors
Compare this with determining
the heridity of a unique illness or
a DNA sequence that is transmitted
from parents to children
Deletion, substitution and insertion of words (in texts) and nucleotides (in DNA) are surprisingly parallel
The method of reconstructing the original data from copies was first developed in philology (Lachmann), and later literally applied in the new booming field of genetics
Art theory:
Leon Battista Alberti
First description of linear perspective (1435)
A representation of reality is achieved by imaginary lines which link the eye of the artist with the subjects in the depiction and which, when they are intersected by the picture plane (the window, the painting), result in the portrayed composition
Alberti’s analysis of perspective
also led to new design techniques
in architecture.
Representations that do not follow
linear perspective are nowadays
perceived as ‘wrong’
(It literally changed our world view)
Historiography:
Joseph Scaliger
Formalization of historical time reckoning (‘chronology’) on the basis of the principle of oldest source (1606)
Scaliger discovered from Egyptian sources that there had been pharao’s living before the Creation of the World (which according to Bible was estimated at 4000 BC) Scaliger tried to ‘save the phenomena’ by placing these pharao’s
in a ‘mythological era’: tempus prolepticon
Scaliger’s discovery results in a debate about the Bible as ‘true’ source, which via I. Vossius, La Pereyre and Spinoza leads to the Enlightenment
Interaction between theory
and empiricism
The early-modern empirical study of art, music and texts results in a new, critical view on the world
Empiricism gets the last word, how beautiful the theory may be…
Study of consonance in music theory, perspective in art theory, and text-reconstruction in philology influence and shape the early natural sciences Influenced especially Galileo, Kepler and Snellius
Interaction humanists &
natural scientists
Thanks to the thorough musical string experiments by
Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei, the combination of
experimental and mathematical research was directly
transmitted to Galileo
Thus the discovery of the empirical cycle is due to the
15th and 16th century humanists who analyzed texts
and music in a critical and empirical way
19th century Linguistics:
Discovery of Indo-European
Discovery of sound change
laws (Grimm,1822)
Hypothesis of Indo-Euro-
pean (1835)
Evolutionary language tree
(1850)
Possibly influenced Darwin
Century later: confirmed
by genetic research
(L. Cavalli-Sforza)
But is also led to the idea of
Arian race…(M. Muller a.o.)
Grimm’s sound change law
p b f t d th k g x
↓ ↓ ↓
f b p th t d x k g
↓ ↓ ↓
b f p d z t g x k
Shift from voiceless to voiced consonants
E.g. treis threis drei (t th d)
Grimm predicted a cycle from voiced back to voiceless!
The Computational Shift
in the Humanities
The Digital Humanities are changing our world, e.g. computational linguistics:
Automatic Speech Recognition (bv. Dragon speech)
Automatic Translation (bv. Systran, Google Translate – only useful as intermediate result)
This development would not have been possible without theoretical linguistics, which brings us back again to Panini, which reaches via N. Chomsky the field of computer science and internet technology
Discoveries in the humanities that
changed the world
Linguistics: Panini’s Grammar, theoretical linguistics programming languages, Internet revolution
Music Theory: Pythagoras’ harmonic music theory numerological view of the world
Philology: Valla’s debugging Reformation, via stemmatic philology Genetics
Art theory: Alberti’s linear perspective revolutionary design techniques in architecture
Historiography: Scaliger’s discovery that the earth is older than according to the Bible Enlightenment
All humanities: Discovery interaction between theory and empiricism Scientific Revolution
Computational and
Digital humanities: Many computational applications e.g. speech recognition, creative industry
Impact of the humanities
The humanities have led to:
Reformation,
Enlightenment,
Scientific Revolution
Genetics
Information technology and
Internet revolution
Why are these great humanistic feats not
generally known?
Two highly influential philosophers W. Dilthey & W. Windelband wanted to emancipate the humanities around 1900:
Natural sciences: focus on explanation (nomothetic)
Search for the law-like and the universal
Humanities: focus on understanding (idiographic) Seach for the special, the unique
However, this distinction does not correspond to what many humanities researchers actually do
Most humanities researchers are empirical and search for patterns and regularities in their data. But Dilthey’s idea is still dominant…
Humanities suffer from
continuous self-criticism
Important insights and feats in the humanities are criticised by humanities researchers themselves…
Continuous criticism on earlier theories
Too bad: we are also still teaching and using Newtonian mechanics even if it is not 100% correct
Good old theories such as stemmatic philology, historical source criticism, formal grammar, and music theory must be kept alive and taught!
Example of importance of good old theory:
Historical source analysis
Historical source analysis & philological
source reconstruction are used for truth-
finding in court
E.g. International Criminal Court in The Hague
Discovery of forged sources in genocide research
The Dutch cabinet Kok II fell in 2002 due to historical
research into the fall of Srebrenica, on the basis of
historical source analysis (NIOD report)
Let’s now go for a second survey
Who has changed their mind about which disciplines
changed the world more profoundly
(humanities/sciences)?
Let’s now go for a second survey
Who has changed their mind about which disciplines changed the world more profoundly (humanities/sciences)?
Perhaps my question could better have been:
Which disciplines changed the world more profoundly?
(1) humanities?
(2) sciences?
(3) the interdisciplinary humanities/sciences/social sciences?
Conclusions
Insights in the humanities have dramatically changed the world (for the good and the bad) There is no lack of impact
It is important to know the general history of the humanities, so as to guard ourselves against misconceptions against the humanities
Next to the importance of the humanities for Bildung etc, we must also stress the world-changing nature of the humanities to policy-makers!
There is a responsibility
for academia
Stress major turning points in the history of the humanities and their impact (at parties, discussions with your parents and friends!)
Publicize the humanities like scientists do: “You can never predict whether certain ideas and
theories will be applied in society or industry”
“But history shows ‘scientific’ ideas are useful”
Investigate the history of the humanities! See upcoming conference The Making of the
Humanities, at KNIR, Rome 2012
The Making of the Humanities III
Third International Conference on the History of
the Humanities, 1-3 November 2012, Rome
http://makingofthehumanitiesIII.blogspot.com/
For a first attempt of a 'full’ history of
the humanities:
Thank you!