TY - CHAP TI - For the Humanities AU - Appiah, K. Anthony T2 - The Humanities in the Age of Information and Post-Truth AB - [From book editors' introduction:] K. Anthony Appiah’s opening essay, “For the Humanities,” explores the distinctive character of learning in the humanities. He argues, as Hazlitt does in regard to the arts, that the humanities “are not progressive,” meaning that art from the remote past remains important to us, in ways that ancient science does not, and work in the humanities presupposes that it continues to be worth studying cultural objects from long ago. More recently, adds Appiah, it has become clear that the humanities are inevitably transnational, in part because many of its objects of study emerge from transcultural interactions. By considering a passage from Cicero’s defense of the poet Archias, he argues that we must see humanistic learning as an inevitable part of the preparation for a life as free citizens, because it trains us for the ethical reflection that is necessary if we are to lead meaningful lives. Appiah also underscores the centrality of the idiographic to the humanities, that is, the importance of understanding particular objects and not just universal truths, which he exemplifies by exploring the particularity of certain ideas contained in Montaigne’s Essays. CY - Evanston, IL DA - 2019/// PY - 2019 DP - DOI.org (Crossref) SP - 25 EP - 44 LA - en PB - Northwestern University Press SN - 978-0-8101-3914-5 978-0-8101-3913-8 UR - http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctv8bt124 Y2 - 2020/06/21/21:13:53 KW - Humanities KW - Humanities and the sciences ER -