How the Humanities Changed the World

Or why we should stop worrying and love the

history of the humanities

Rens Bod University of Amsterdam

Institute for Logic, Language and Computation

Let’s start with a small survey

Which disciplines changed the world more

profoundly?

(1) The Humanities

(2) The Sciences

The humanities are under great

pressure world-wide

Humanities are increasingly marginalized and are viewed by policy makers as useless for technology and economy

Most reactions are defensive: Critical mind and cultural awareness

Bildung (self-cultivation)

Social responsibility (E. Said)

Democratic consiousness (M. Nussbaum)

It is often forgotten that the humanities have led to world-changing insights and discoveries

The humanities should guard

themselves against misconceptions

Insights in the humanities have been attributed to the sciences – also by humanities scholars!

Academic institutes, students and scholars have a responsibility to show the relevance of the humanities – even if just to survive themselves..

The comparative history of the humanities is of great

help here

The history of the humanities is

largely uninvestigated

E.g. Dutch minister of Science, Culture and

Education, Ronald Plasterk, claimed:

“The humanities write history,

but the sciences make history”

Is he right or wrong?

Definition of ‘humanities’

W. Dilthey (1911):

“The humanities study the expressions of the

human mind”

such as the study of music, language, art,

literature, theater, texts…

In 21st century there are many different ways

to investigate expressions of the human mind

Not only historical and hermeneutic methods but

also digital methods

Humanities vs natural sciences

and social sciences

Natural sciences study nature

Physics, astronomy,

chemistry, biology,

Social sciences study human behavior in their

social environment

Psychology, sociology,

anthropology, economics…

What is this talk about?

These are my main questions:

In what way did insights from the humanities change the world?

And where do the preconceptions about the humanities come from? Such as: “The humanities are a luxury without

economic impact”

I will guide you through 25 centuries of history in 25 minutes… We should keep in mind that humanities are seen as

separate branch of disciplines only since 19th century

Linguistics: notion of

“Grammar” (600 BCE)

One of the most important discoveries of all time is the notion of rule-based system for human language, a ‘grammar’

A finite number of rules describes all infinitely many correct (‘grammatical’) sentences

The Indian linguist Panini developed in 6th century BCE such a rule-based system for Sanskrit using the notion of Recursion

+voc +len /- +voc +savarNa

rAma-s- + ShaShTha rAma-Sh-ShaShTha

ya-t- + nAsti ya-n-nAsti etc.

Recursion is known as the “Droste effect”

The impact of the notion of

‘Recursion’

Thanks to recursion, a finite number of rules can cover a infinite number of sentences

E.g. the sentence: I see the man that hits the cat that is chased by the dog that is spotted by the photographer that is…

i.e. the rule for subclauses is used in the rule for subclauses itself: one can go deeper and deeper using recursion

Panini’s grammar-formalism was used as a model

for first higher-level programming languages ALGOL60, Panini-Backus Normal Form

Panini’s formalism made ICT formally and technologically possible!

Music theory:

Pythagoras (6th c. BCE)

Pythagoras not only investigated mathematics

but also music perception

His discovery: harmonic intervals

(‘consonances’) coincide with simple number

ratios: octave=1/2, fifth=2/3, fourth=3/4

According to Pythagoras the third was not consonant

(but since late middle ages, the third is perceived as

consonant)

“Mind and nature consist of

numbers”

Pythagoras’s idea to describe musical harmony in terms of numbers (which Aristoxenus extended to musical melodies) may have had an even greater impact than the discovery of ‘grammar’

Led to the insight that the world

(both mind and nature) can be understood

bu numbers: e.g. Harmony of the Spheres

This world view emerged from the Study of Music which for a long time was seen as cosmological

Philology: Lorenzo Valla’s

‘discovery’ (1440)

Philology: on the basis of correspondences and differences (errors) in variants of transmitted texts the original (archetype) can be reconstructed

The philologist Lorenzo Valla shows in 1440 that the document “Donatio Constantini” (“The Donation of Constantine”) is a forgery

According to this document the Roman emperor Constantine would have donated the West-Roman empire in the early 4th c. to the Pope!

Impact of Valla’s discovery

Valla’s discovery caused an enormous shock in 15th and 16th century Europe

It was taken up by Luther and

and others and was one of the

motives for the Reformation

The very idea of philological source reconstruction (Poliziano, Bentley, Lachmann a.o.) by figuring out the errors in transmission even influenced biology centuries later (i.e. DNA analysis – see Dawkins 2008)

Underlying idea of source

reconstruction

When there is an error in a copied document – e.g. a missing word – then descendents of the document will have the same common errors

Thus all variants with a certain error can be traced

back to a common ancestor where this error occurred for the first time

If there are more common errors, a genealogical family tree can be constructed, a stemma

Example of a stemma

Common errors point at common

ancestors

Compare this with determining

the heridity of a unique illness or

a DNA sequence that is transmitted

from parents to children

Deletion, substitution and insertion of words (in texts) and nucleotides (in DNA) are surprisingly parallel

The method of reconstructing the original data from copies was first developed in philology (Lachmann), and later literally applied in the new booming field of genetics

Art theory:

Leon Battista Alberti

First description of linear perspective (1435)

A representation of reality is achieved by imaginary lines which link the eye of the artist with the subjects in the depiction and which, when they are intersected by the picture plane (the window, the painting), result in the portrayed composition

Alberti’s analysis of perspective

also led to new design techniques

in architecture.

Representations that do not follow

linear perspective are nowadays

perceived as ‘wrong’

(It literally changed our world view)

Historiography:

Joseph Scaliger

Formalization of historical time reckoning (‘chronology’) on the basis of the principle of oldest source (1606)

Scaliger discovered from Egyptian sources that there had been pharao’s living before the Creation of the World (which according to Bible was estimated at 4000 BC) Scaliger tried to ‘save the phenomena’ by placing these pharao’s

in a ‘mythological era’: tempus prolepticon

Scaliger’s discovery results in a debate about the Bible as ‘true’ source, which via I. Vossius, La Pereyre and Spinoza leads to the Enlightenment

Interaction between theory

and empiricism

The early-modern empirical study of art, music and texts results in a new, critical view on the world

Empiricism gets the last word, how beautiful the theory may be…

Study of consonance in music theory, perspective in art theory, and text-reconstruction in philology influence and shape the early natural sciences Influenced especially Galileo, Kepler and Snellius

Interaction humanists &

natural scientists

Thanks to the thorough musical string experiments by

Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei, the combination of

experimental and mathematical research was directly

transmitted to Galileo

Thus the discovery of the empirical cycle is due to the

15th and 16th century humanists who analyzed texts

and music in a critical and empirical way

19th century Linguistics:

Discovery of Indo-European

Discovery of sound change

laws (Grimm,1822)

Hypothesis of Indo-Euro-

pean (1835)

Evolutionary language tree

(1850)

Possibly influenced Darwin

Century later: confirmed

by genetic research

(L. Cavalli-Sforza)

But is also led to the idea of

Arian race…(M. Muller a.o.)

Grimm’s sound change law

p b f t d th k g x

↓ ↓ ↓

f b p th t d x k g

↓ ↓ ↓

b f p d z t g x k

Shift from voiceless to voiced consonants

E.g. treis threis drei (t th d)

Grimm predicted a cycle from voiced back to voiceless!

The Computational Shift

in the Humanities

The Digital Humanities are changing our world, e.g. computational linguistics:

Automatic Speech Recognition (bv. Dragon speech)

Automatic Translation (bv. Systran, Google Translate – only useful as intermediate result)

This development would not have been possible without theoretical linguistics, which brings us back again to Panini, which reaches via N. Chomsky the field of computer science and internet technology

Discoveries in the humanities that

changed the world

Linguistics: Panini’s Grammar, theoretical linguistics programming languages, Internet revolution

Music Theory: Pythagoras’ harmonic music theory numerological view of the world

Philology: Valla’s debugging Reformation, via stemmatic philology Genetics

Art theory: Alberti’s linear perspective revolutionary design techniques in architecture

Historiography: Scaliger’s discovery that the earth is older than according to the Bible Enlightenment

All humanities: Discovery interaction between theory and empiricism Scientific Revolution

Computational and

Digital humanities: Many computational applications e.g. speech recognition, creative industry

Impact of the humanities

The humanities have led to:

Reformation,

Enlightenment,

Scientific Revolution

Genetics

Information technology and

Internet revolution

Why are these great humanistic feats not

generally known?

Two highly influential philosophers W. Dilthey & W. Windelband wanted to emancipate the humanities around 1900:

Natural sciences: focus on explanation (nomothetic)

Search for the law-like and the universal

Humanities: focus on understanding (idiographic) Seach for the special, the unique

However, this distinction does not correspond to what many humanities researchers actually do

Most humanities researchers are empirical and search for patterns and regularities in their data. But Dilthey’s idea is still dominant…

Humanities suffer from

continuous self-criticism

Important insights and feats in the humanities are criticised by humanities researchers themselves…

Continuous criticism on earlier theories

Too bad: we are also still teaching and using Newtonian mechanics even if it is not 100% correct

Good old theories such as stemmatic philology, historical source criticism, formal grammar, and music theory must be kept alive and taught!

Example of importance of good old theory:

Historical source analysis

Historical source analysis & philological

source reconstruction are used for truth-

finding in court

E.g. International Criminal Court in The Hague

Discovery of forged sources in genocide research

The Dutch cabinet Kok II fell in 2002 due to historical

research into the fall of Srebrenica, on the basis of

historical source analysis (NIOD report)

Let’s now go for a second survey

Who has changed their mind about which disciplines

changed the world more profoundly

(humanities/sciences)?

Let’s now go for a second survey

Who has changed their mind about which disciplines changed the world more profoundly (humanities/sciences)?

Perhaps my question could better have been:

Which disciplines changed the world more profoundly?

(1) humanities?

(2) sciences?

(3) the interdisciplinary humanities/sciences/social sciences?

Conclusions

Insights in the humanities have dramatically changed the world (for the good and the bad) There is no lack of impact

It is important to know the general history of the humanities, so as to guard ourselves against misconceptions against the humanities

Next to the importance of the humanities for Bildung etc, we must also stress the world-changing nature of the humanities to policy-makers!

There is a responsibility

for academia

Stress major turning points in the history of the humanities and their impact (at parties, discussions with your parents and friends!)

Publicize the humanities like scientists do: “You can never predict whether certain ideas and

theories will be applied in society or industry”

“But history shows ‘scientific’ ideas are useful”

Investigate the history of the humanities! See upcoming conference The Making of the

Humanities, at KNIR, Rome 2012

The Making of the Humanities III

Third International Conference on the History of

the Humanities, 1-3 November 2012, Rome

http://makingofthehumanitiesIII.blogspot.com/

For a first attempt of a 'full’ history of

the humanities:

Thank you!