What the History of the Humanities Can, and Cannot, Learn from the History of Science

Abstract

What can the history of the humanities learn from the history of science? Quite a lot. We could certainly include a much more developed inspection of humanistic practices and of the many, often previously unacknowledged, people who contributed to them. But the history of science cannot deliver for us a set of parameters that define our subject clearly, and perhaps we ought not to go too deeply into the history of practices, or combine this with the recognition that we have our own similar traditions to revive. Finally, the sciences and humanities are today in quite different positions with respect to the need to deconstruct legitimizing discourses. If historians of science need to constantly remind the public that geniuses often have feet of clay, the history of the humanities has, at least at present, a different burden: to show that many persons in the past have striven to understand the human condition, often in ways we now find objectionable, but sometimes in ways that inspired, illuminated, educated, and liberated the minds of readers, contemporary and future.