Humanities

The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences.
The humanities include ancient and modern languages, literature, law, history, philosophy, religion, and visual and performing arts such as music and theatre. The humanities that are also regarded as social sciences include technology, anthropology, area studies, communication studies, cultural studies, and linguistics. Scholars working in the humanities are sometimes describe ...more

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How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives

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The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change

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Humanities Books

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics (Politics of Place, #1)

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Lists

Selected Writings, Volume 2 by Walter Benjamin

For the Well-Being of All by Bonnie J Taylor

Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1 by Walter Benjamin

Principles of Spiritual Economics by Hooshmand Badee

Selected Writings, Volume 4 by Walter Benjamin

Economic Theology

18 books — 2 voters

Femininity, Hypergamy And Leveling Up Books: Non-fiction

38 books — 51 voters

Arts & Humanities for the College Bound

29 books — 10 voters

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe... by Daniel Defoe

The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Marta McDowell

William Bartram, The Search for Nature's Design by Thomas Hallock

Nature Lit — Literature & Oral Tradition, with regard to the Natural World

282 books — 6 voters

Who Hears Here? by Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Friedrich Engels

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin

Culture and Society, 1780-1950 by Raymond Williams

Critique of cultural studies from within.

109 books — 18 voters

The Nicest Kids in Town by Matthew F. Delmont

Boy at the Window by Lauren Melissa Ellzey

Scripps College Alum and Faculty Authors

137 books — 10 voters

Related Genres

Nonfiction
Language
Classical Studies

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Quotes Tagged “Humanities”

“ In my parents' day and age, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it's the discipline. Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it's the classics that are to blame. Today the student asserts his incapacity as a privilege. I can't learn it, so there is something wrong with it. And there is something especially wrong with the bad teacher who wants to teach it. There are no more criteria, Mr. Zuckerman, only opinions. ...more ”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

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“ I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily–against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better. This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. ...more ”
― Charles Darwin, Autobiography Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Descent of Man A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World Coral Reefs Voyage of the Beagle Origin of Species Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals

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