Definition of Humanities

1. Humanities, as a category of training and research, is a set of disciplines -philosophy, literature, languages, arts, architecture, etc.- dedicated to studying the actions, creations and way of thinking of human beings based on a critical perspective.

Etymology: By the Latin forms humanitas, humanĭtātisof ‘humanity’, with respect to humanusfrom ‘human’, based homin-, homofrom ‘man’, ‘human being’, associated with the Indo-European root *ghemon-*ghemon, for ‘earthly’, ‘of the earth’, from which the term also derives humus, of Earth’; followed by the suffix -ānus, depending on membership. The first approaches of the term ‘humanities’ with the academic framework denote the study of language and literature, history and philosophy.

Grammatical category: noun fem.
in syllables: hu-ma-ni-da-des.

Humanities

We understand by Humanities (from the Latin humanitas, which refers to “humanity” as well as “human nature”) to the set of disciplines, generally characterized as non-scientific, dedicated to the order of the human and its intellectual productions. Philosophy, arts, language and literature are considered examples of Humanities.

knowledge about man

The Humanities have been defined as a specific type of knowledge about the human, whose origin dates back to the middle of the 13th century in Europe, and which take man as an object of study in terms of his distinctive characteristics with respect to all animals. . However, there are other types of knowledge about the human that, although they are often named as synonymous with the Humanities, have their own characteristics and refer to different historical moments. This is the case of the Human Sciences, which take place from the 18th century onwards, and which take the human being as an object of fragmented analysis, according to its multiple dimensions: social, cultural, psychological, religious, among others. Likewise, it is also the case of the Science of Man, which emerged as an autonomous research field only in the 19th century, whose object of study is man, but considered, in turn, as a subject that produces the knowledge in question. In this sense, man thinks of himself as both a condition and an effect of the knowledge that he produces.

The Humanities, as an area of ​​study, are characterized by intellectual and discursive work, focused on reading, criticizing, and commenting on a specific textual corpus (whether based on its author, a theme, a field). problematic, etc.). Traditionally, these are not considered part of the special sciences (such as, for example, Anthropological Sciences, Sociology or History). It should be noted, in this sense, that the so-called Humanities present very different methodological characteristics with respect to the Social Sciences. However, there are specific fields within the Humanities in general intended for reflection on the production of knowledge and scientific praxis, as is the case, for example, of Epistemology or the Philosophy of Sciences.

The crisis of the Humanities and the emergence of new posthumanismyes

After the criticisms of Humanism developed throughout the 20th century by authors such as the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918 – 1990), or the leading philosophers of French post-structuralism, Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984) and Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004), the contemporary academic debate has recovered this anti-humanist heritage in a positive sense, giving way to the idea of ​​new posthumanitieswhich, as its name indicates, would replace the previous ones from a redefinition of the notion of the human being and its relations with everything that surrounds it, from different points of view: the posthumanismtranshumanism, metahumanities, new materialities, etc.

The current transhumanist A reflection on the human in relation to science and technology is proposed, particularly, problematizing the idea of human enhancement, from which the limits that separate the human being from the machines are put in tension. In this sense, transhumanism would not constitute a criticism of humanism, but a deepening of human exceptionalism, according to which a higher hierarchy of man is considered compared to other forms of existence.

On the contrary, the posthumanism it is directed towards a dismantling of said exceptionalism, in pursuit of a multiplication of alliances between humans and non-humans (whether machines or biological organisms). Overcoming human exceptionality in a post-humanist sense, thus, has nothing to do with an improvement of the species, but with a questioning of the anthropocentric assumptions by virtue of which the primacy of humans was historically sustained over others. kingdoms, both the animal, the vegetable and the mineral. Consequently, the interest of this current is oriented towards the conceptualization of hybrid forms of existence, in which a cooperation and not a hierarchy between the different beings is verified.

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