Expositions Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities最新文献_第5页

The Useful Uselessness of the Humanities 人文学科的无用之处

Expositions Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities Pub Date : 2008-01-01 DOI: 10.1558/EXPO.V2I1.019

D. Roochnik

{"title":"The Useful Uselessness of the Humanities","authors":"D. Roochnik","doi":"10.1558/EXPO.V2I1.019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/EXPO.V2I1.019","url":null,"abstract":"Stanley Fish responds to the question with which he titles his essay, \" how Will the humanities Save Us? \" by objecting to its implicit assumption. As he puts it, \" It is not the business of the humanities to save us. \" What, then, do they do? Fish answers: They don't do anything, if by \" do \" is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don't bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them. his voice here is not cynical, nor does he counsel despair, for he argues that it is precisely this doing-nothing, this inherent uselessness, of the humanities that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said…diminishes the object of its supposed praise. With these remarks Fish comes perilously close to being right. But he's not there yet. This is because he does not quite understand how in \" doing \" nothing, in failing to be useful or justifiable by reference to some value external to themselves, the humanities are actually useful. Their usefulness is indirect, no doubt minimal, and perhaps even paradoxical, but useful they nonetheless are. Such, at least, is the thesis I will propose. Full disclosure: the view I endorse actually belongs to Aristotle. And so, after briefly sketching a few of Fish's arguments, I will devote the bulk of this short paper to some reflections about his Metaphysics and his Politics. In doing so, I will be forced to employ several Aristotelian notions that time will allow me neither to defend nor even to elaborate. I must, therefore, ask for the reader's willingness to entertain the propo","PeriodicalId":30121,"journal":{"name":"Expositions Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities","volume":"85 1","pages":"19-26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86699950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Overheard in the Academy: Stanley Fish on the Humanities 无意中听到学院:斯坦利·费什谈人文科学

Expositions Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities Pub Date : 2008-01-01 DOI: 10.1558/EXPO.V2I1.005

B. Prusak

引用次数: 1

The “Reflexive Humanities” “反思性人文”

Expositions Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities Pub Date : 2008-01-01 DOI: 10.1558/EXPO.V2I1.027

Vicki Tromanhauser

{"title":"The “Reflexive Humanities”","authors":"Vicki Tromanhauser","doi":"10.1558/EXPO.V2I1.027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/EXPO.V2I1.027","url":null,"abstract":"A recent article in The New York Review of Books about affluence in America offered sobering news for today's college students and the parents funding their education. Its assessment of the value of higher education featured two tables, one documenting skyrocketing tuitions over the last thirty years and another estimating what college degrees are worth in terms of yearly income (hacker 2007, 32, 33). The news does not look good, and in particular for the humanities. So it is no surprise that rising costs of higher education have pressed the humanities into an increasingly defensive posture and prompted concerns about their ability to earn their keep among neighboring disciplines with more immediately practical applications to advertise. Such trends bespeak a cultural preoccupation with the economic bottom line and the growing perception of education as a saleable commodity whose investors have every right to expect a material return. When value is conceived in purely financial terms, the humanities are destined to fare rather poorly. It is in this defensive climate that Stanley Fish in his recent New York Times piece interjects his deliberately provocative claim: \" To the question 'of what use are the humanities?', the only honest answer is none whatsoever. \" Fish's small concession of the intrinsic pleasures the humanities bring to those who practice them is a slim peg on which to hang an entire tradition of intellectual inquiry and at the same time appears suspiciously cozy with the pressures of the very market forces from which he seeks to protect humanities departments. measuring the value of the humanities solely in terms of the pleasure they yield those who study them can prove a limiting proposition that, as mark Edmund-son warns, educators in the classroom have been inclined to take all too literally (Edmundson 1997). The culture of consumption has","PeriodicalId":30121,"journal":{"name":"Expositions Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities","volume":"133 1","pages":"27-34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79389799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Care of the Soul: Service-Learning and the Value of the Humanities 关怀心灵:服务学习与人文价值

Expositions Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities Pub Date : 2008-01-01 DOI: 10.1558/EXPO.V2I1.007

James Boettcher

{"title":"Care of the Soul: Service-Learning and the Value of the Humanities","authors":"James Boettcher","doi":"10.1558/EXPO.V2I1.007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/EXPO.V2I1.007","url":null,"abstract":"contemporary debates about the proper role of the humanities in college and university education have been shaped by a multitude of exi-gencies and trends both within and outside of the academy, from ordinary budgetary constraints to changing institutional and professional norms, and from increasingly consumerist attitudes about education to the emergence of new media and communications technology. Value pluralism, recognition of the importance of cultural diversity, and processes of globalization have led to ongoing and sometimes quite heated discussion about curricular content. moreover, the remarkable achievements of the natural sciences, which have yielded so many practical gains, only heighten the anxiety of those who would seek to determine just what \" use \" the humanities serve. While some of the terminology in these debates may be new—witness the pressure on instructors across disciplines to specify measurable \" learning objectives \" and \" outcomes assessments \" —the underlying questions are not so different from those which motivated matthew Arnold's classic defense of the humanities over a century ago. The \" humane letters, \" Arnold argues, uniquely engage our emotions and exercise a valuable influence on our conduct and sense of beauty. Arnold's conclusion is that the humanities are not \" in much actual danger of being thrust out from their leading place in education…So long as human nature is what it is, their attractions will remain irresistible \" (Arnold 1975, 72). According to a new book by Anthony Kronman, the humanities have lost not only their leading position in post-secondary education, but, more important, their relevance in guiding students through a critical examination of what it means to live a good life as a human being (Kronman 2007). Kronman places much of the blame for this","PeriodicalId":30121,"journal":{"name":"Expositions Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities","volume":"44 1","pages":"7-12"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78888583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 1

On Reading St. Augustine’s Confessions 解读圣奥古斯丁的《忏悔录

Expositions Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities Pub Date : 2008-01-01 DOI: 10.1558/EXPO.V2I1.059

T. Breyfogle

{"title":"On Reading St. Augustine’s Confessions","authors":"T. Breyfogle","doi":"10.1558/EXPO.V2I1.059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/EXPO.V2I1.059","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is intended as a guide for beginning readers of Augustine, for teachers charged with helping these readers understand Augustine, and for those interested in a problem that confronted Augustine first as a reader and eventually as an author: how do books help us understand ourselves even as we understand their author? A famously dysfunctional reader, Don Quixote de la Mancha, opens the essay as an example of a soul imprisoned by books because subject to slavish imitation. With this caution firmly in view, I offer a series of tips on how readers of the Confessions can approach the work with appropriate freshness, developing strategies for reading not only Augustine but also other great authors as well. I stress especially the dialogical character of Confessions and, with it, Augustine’s qualified continuity with the Platonic-Socratic tradition of text-as-conversation. In so doing, I emphasize Augustine’s emerging pedagogy based on his understanding of the function of signs and the affective character of the poetic imagination. In this way, Augustine translates the Socratic tradition into a distinctively Christian idiom while providing a prospective antidote to Quixote’s misplaced flights of intellectual and moral fancy, inviting the reader to begin his own independent spiritual journey.","PeriodicalId":30121,"journal":{"name":"Expositions Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities","volume":"42 1","pages":"59-82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77972160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Kathryn Hughes, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. $29.95 cloth 凯瑟琳·休斯，《比顿夫人的短暂一生》。纽约:Alfred A. Knopf, 2006。布29.95美元

Expositions Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities Pub Date : 2007-07-07 DOI: 10.1558/EXPO.V1I2.233

M. Hill

引用次数: 7

Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of our Religious Tradition . Alfred A. Knopf. New York/Toronto, 2006. pp. 469 凯伦·阿姆斯特朗，《伟大的转变:我们宗教传统的开始》。阿尔弗雷德·a·克诺夫。纽约/多伦多，2006年。469页。

Expositions Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities Pub Date : 2007-07-07 DOI: 10.1558/EXPO.V1I2.229

Thomas Cattoi

引用次数: 0

The Piety of Socrates and Maimonides: Doing God's Work on Earth 苏格拉底和迈蒙尼德的虔诚:在地球上做上帝的工作

Expositions Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities Pub Date : 2007-07-07 DOI: 10.1558/EXPO.V1I2.141

Roslyn Weiss

引用次数: 1

Humanity at the Turning Point 转折点上的人类

Expositions Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities Pub Date : 2007-07-07 DOI: 10.1558/EXPO.V1I2.191

Dennis M. Weiss

引用次数: 0

Sincerity and Seduction in 'Don Giovanni' 《唐璜》中的真诚与诱惑

Expositions Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities Pub Date : 2007-07-07 DOI: 10.1558/EXPO.V1I2.173

James H. Johnson

引用次数: 0