I am clearly biased. After all, I teach philosophy for a living. I went to University and graduate school in philosophy. So, I am likely to be fond of the humanities in general and philosophy in particular.
But, I have to say, more than fifteen years after I graduated, I almost daily come back to some question, work, discussion or issue that I was introduced to in some humanities class, whether humanities itself or theology or Russian literature or philosophy. The fact that I still feed on those morsels says something to be about the human—not the economic or employment or market—value of the humanities. After all, we are humans, right?
For some of those other values, I highly recommend Martha Nussbaum's, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.
2 comments:
Your last two posts have been great. I'd forgotten the etymology of passion. Thanks for the great reminder.
Over at In Socrates' Wake blog, they're going to be having a public reading group of Nussbaum's book.
I read it a few weeks back and enjoyed both her argument and her style of writing. I thought she was slightly repetitious in some places and maybe obvious, but points that seem repetitious or obvious to me wouldn't to her target audience, so I might chip in to the discussion.
I think the Wake is only getting better.
And, thank you.
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