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Abstract
The future of the humanities is an extremely complex question as it bears upon the status of a particular form of knowledge in society, the flexibility of a set of academic disciplines and institutions, the openness of political leaders to changing conceptions of education, and a host of other difficult issues. In order to illuminate these problems, it is necessary to focus upon the peculiar character of humanistic knowledge, why such insight is indispensable to individual and collective self-understanding, how the humanities as they are conventionally practised contribute to their own malaise and why the humanities must be accorded pride of place among the studies of human action. There is, in fact, a considerable demand for humanistic knowledge and the fruit of humanistic scholarship in our technological culture, especially in the area of adult education. The discussion ends with several examples of various ways in which that demand is being met.
Notes
1. I have developed this point in my study “Theater and knowledge: towards a dramatic epistemology and an epistemology of drama” (Citation2005).
2. Aristotle Nichomachean ethics, book 6, chapter 3.
3. I have participated in such discussions in Sweden since the mid-1980s. For an overview of this aspect of the background to my argument, see Göranzon et al. (Citation1995).
4. See the advertising for the British Export Credits Guarantee Department, Financial Times, 26 April 1989, p. 9. Cf. Marvin Minsky's 1967 claim, “Within a generation … the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved”, quoted in Crevier (Citation1993).
5. The locus classicus is Polanyi (Citation1962). See Janik (Citation1995).
6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 6.211.
7. A Danish colleague who was rector of a pedagogical academy, for example, complained that it was impossible for him to convince the philosophers in his institution to devote their energies to working with colleagues on conceptual problems involved in educational practice because they were entirely preoccupied with international philosophical debates.
8. Monika Seekircher, for example, worked successfully together with scientists for three years investigating how ion physicists learn to use machines without herself ever having studied physics. See Janik et al. (Citation2000).
9. This is an authentic example taken from my own circle of acquaintances, but it is also typical of a situation that many engineers, for example, find themselves in at mid-careers. I have learned a great deal about their professional problems from conversations with Maria Janiec of Eriksson.
10. Janik (Citation2000). The text of the 1995 EU White Paper on lifelong learning is available from: http://www.cec.lu/en/commdg22.html.
11. In this context I have benefited greatly from collaboration with Peter Tillberg and Karl Ydén of the Swedish National Defence College on questions about studying military competence from within. See Tillberg et al. (Citation2008).
12. The Economist, 10 October 2009, 72.
13. I am grateful to Professor Danielsson for innumerable conversations about problems of method in social studies over the last two decades.
15. www.motiv.tudelft.nl.