Introduction: The Humanities and the Sciences

Author(s): Rens Bod and Julia Kursell

Source: Isis, Vol. 106, No. 2 (June 2015), pp. 337-340
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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FOCUS: THE HISTORY OF HUMANITIES AND
THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

Introduction: The Humanities and the

Sciences

Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam

Julia Kursell, University of Amsterdam

Abstract: The humanities and the sciences have a strongly connected history, yet
their histories continue to be written separately. Although the scope of the history
of science has undergone a tremendous broadening during the past few decades,
scholars of the history of the humanities and the history of science still seem to
belong to two separate cultures that have endured through the past century. This
Focus section explores what common ground would enable a study of the histories
of the humanities and the sciences to investigate their shared epistemic objects,
virtues, values, methods, and practices.

T he debate on the two cultures that was initiated by C. P. Snow in 1959 has become history.
The divide Snow construed between science and culture has not only been criticized ever
since, but historians of science have also thoroughly revised the view of a history of science
as being remote from a history of culture. Historians of science have looked at the infrastruc-
tures, cultural settings, and social interactions that shape the sciences; they have related the
sciences to the arts, crafts, scientific education, and popular cultures of knowledge; and,
eventually, they have pointed at the role that methods in disciplines traditionally associated
with the humanities—from philology to historiography— have played in the sciences. Nev-
ertheless, the historiographies of the sciences and the humanities seem to persist as two
separate fields, and so far there is no work that brings the two fields together on equal footing.
So, what are the “humanities”? The problem of time in St. Augustine comes to mind here:
if you don’t ask, we know, but if you ask, we are left empty handed.1 In the case of the
humanities, however, the problem is one of abundance rather than emptiness. To be sure, the
histories of the humanities and the sciences are confronted with the same problems when it
comes to historical terms for their object. Sorting out a notion of science from the changing
attributions to artes and scientiae alone would be an endless task. This seems different for the
term “humanities,” which, in all of its many meanings, has emerged from stating oppositions:

Rens Bod: Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 107,
1098 XG Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Julia Kursell: Institute of Musicology, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam,
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16 –18, 1012 CP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This Focus section is the outcome of a workshop organized
at the University of Amsterdam on 28 August 2014 with the section’s participants and in the presence of Floris Cohen. It was planned
that John Pickstone would contribute as well to this Focus section, but his untimely death prevented this.
This Focus section was organized by Rens Bod and Julia Kursell.
1 St. Augustine, Confessions, Book 11, ch. 20.

Isis, volume 106, number 2. © 2015 by The History of Science Society.

All rights reserved. 0021-1753/2015/10602-0006$10.00
337

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338 Rens Bod and Julia Kursell Focus: The History of Humanities and Science Introduction

of humans toward God, of human culture as opposed to nature, and of human attempts to
understand and interpret rather than to measure and count. The humanities study texts, but
not those that are concerned with the word of God. They study the products of human
culture, but in this they are “typically distinguished from the social sciences in having a
significant historical element, in the use of interpretation of texts and artefacts rather than
experimental and quantitative methods, and in having an idiographic rather than nomothetic
character,” as we learn from the Oxford English Dictionary. The most recent entries in the
dictionary—which concern combinations that occur mostly in university contexts, such as
“humanities program,” “humanities faculty,” and so forth— even suggest that the word easily
translates into “Geisteswissenschaften,” the term that was essential for creating the divide
between the humanities and the sciences in the nineteenth century.
The further back we look, the more we have to consider that the terms have not remained
stable. But while we seem to have a more or less unwavering notion of “sciences,” at least in
English today, the term “humanities” has continued to be ambiguous up to the present day.
At first sight, a definition seems to be at hand, given by Wilhelm Dilthey in the late nineteenth
century. In his immensely influential view, the Geisteswissenschaften were the disciplines that
investigated the expressions of the human mind.2 Such expressions included language, music,
art, literature, and theater; and thus philology, linguistics, musicology, art history, literary
studies, and theater studies certainly belonged to the realm of the humanities, and they still
do. But the term “humanities” can be used to refer to the subjects that are studied by these
disciplines, as well. Sometimes the two meanings are even conflated, and the ambiguities do
not end there. Humanist scholarship is a candidate for further confusion. The studia humani-
tatis can be confined to grammar, rhetoric, poetics, history, and moral philosophy and thus do
not, for instance, include music and the visual arts; yet eminent scholars who have worked on
this delineation, such as Paul Oskar Kristeller, apparently felt the urge to look exactly there.
That is, he looked to the arts and music for a better understanding of humanists’ scholarship.3
The history of the humanities is in a similar position, as is the history of science.
Scholarship on the history of science up to the early modern period shows that our concept
of the sciences implies boundaries that do not reach back very far in time. In addition, the
impossibility of strictly delineating the boundaries between our concepts of the sciences and
the humanities in earlier times already points us to the need for a common history. It is
generally accepted that the histories of, say, biology and history overlap in such a field as
natural history. In this Focus section, however, we have chosen not to address those times
when there was no divide. Of course, the study of literature, language, music, art, and the past
already existed long before the term “humanities” was coined, and the configurations among
these fields of study and what has become the sciences surely have changed. Even so, the
question that we want to explore here is what the growing divide in the nineteenth century,
and its subsequent persistence up to the present day, has meant for the possibility and also
perhaps for the need of working toward one common, integrated history.
The history of the humanities itself is a young field. Moreover, the humanities are not
limited to the Western world—they are found in all civilizations and regions, from China to
Africa and from the Arab world to pre-Columbian America. While historical studies of

2 Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und

der Geschichte (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1883), p. 29. For an English translation see Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works,
trans. and ed. Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), Vol. 1.
3 See Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990).

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 FOCUS
ISIS—Volume 106, Number 2, June 2015 339

separate humanistic disciplines are legion, historical study of the humanities that brings them
together from a global perspective is just about to take shape.4 Since 2008, a conference series
on the history of the humanities has been taking place and has resulted in an edited book
series on the history of the humanities.5 More recently a society has been started, along with
a journal (History of Humanities).
In the first essay in this Focus section, Jeroen Bouterse and Bart Karstens investigate how
the divide between the sciences and the humanities became pronounced and critical in the
second half of the nineteenth century, with enduring consequences. The authors show that
the social sciences, and more specifically the shifting constellations between psychology and
the study of language, were particularly important for the development of various conceptions
of humanistic disciplines that emerged during the nineteenth century. On these grounds,
Bouterse and Karstens argue that the relation between Dilthey’s dichotomy between under-
standing and explaining on the one hand, and Windelband’s dichotomy between nomothetic
and idiographic sciences on the other, can be better understood against the background of the
separating sciences and humanities. Significantly, psychology ends up on both sides of the
divide and can thus be considered a case in point for discussing the divide itself once more.
In the second contribution, Julia Kursell reflects on the case of Hermann von Helmholtz’s
studies of music. Helmholtz was intrigued by the music of Renaissance composer Giovanni
Pierluigi da Palestrina. His very concept of that music’s beauty, however, strongly depended
on both the state of research into music of earlier times and Helmholtz’s own experimental
investigations. The latter involved his new concept of “distortion,” which enabled him to
investigate the physiological processes of hearing but which also defined his notion of beauty.
As Kursell argues, the actual divide between university disciplines did not necessarily entail
separate epistemologies. Rather, common research objects, such as Palestrina’s music,
brought together various approaches within musicological study that only later came to be
located on different sides of the divide.
In remaining separate, the histories of the humanities and the sciences thus maintained a
division that dates from the nineteenth century and persisted during the twentieth. Most
recently, this divide has been challenged through the growing interest in digital methods, in
both the humanities and the sciences. The use of those methodologies does not stop at the
core disciplines of the humanities. The search for formalisms and patterns, typically carried
out today with digital technologies, reaches far into the humanities’ own traditions. One can
even claim, as does Rens Bod, that the humanities have been actively taking part in shaping
the methodology. In his essay, he notes that formalisms and rules are found not only where
one would expect them (in the allegedly nomothetic sciences) but also where one would not
expect them—in the presumed idiographic humanistic disciplines. Bod proposes a compar-
ative framework for studying the history of the humanities and the sciences at the level of
formalisms used and patterns found.
In the concluding essay, Lorraine Daston and Glenn Most summarize the pros and cons
of including a history of the humanities in the history of science. Reasons for such an

4 For the first general history of the humanities see Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and
Patterns from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013). For an overview that focuses on the Western
humanities until the early twentieth century see James Turner, Philology: The Hidden Origins of the Modern Humanities
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014).
5 Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn, eds., The Making of the Humanities, 3 vols. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press,

2010 –2014); the volumes are subtitled Vol. 1: Early Modern Europe (2010), Vol. 2: From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines
(2012), and Vol. 3: The Modern Humanities (2014).

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340 Rens Bod and Julia Kursell Focus: The History of Humanities and Science Introduction

inclusion are obvious, because the histories of scholarship point toward shared epistemic
virtues across the boundaries of disciplines. Is it not likely that neighbors in small university
towns such as Göttingen—the pride of place for both philologists and natural scientists—
discussed their views as they walked to their nearby offices? We should not, however, infer
from this that we can rashly give up on useful delineations of the history of science’s epistemic
objects. The history of the humanities could only improve through a closer contact with the
history of science. Up to this point, histories of the humanities are being written mostly from
within the disciplines themselves. This brings Daston and Most to argue for a history of
classifications of the different knowledge-making disciplines. They envision a strategic,
comparison-oriented cooperation between historians of science and historians of philology, so
as to bring the history of science and the humanities onto an equal footing.
Many readers will have a history of their own in the sciences’ and the humanities’
approaches to their objects of study. We therefore leave it to our readers to come up with
further questions about the delineation of the common objects of study. Our goal of bringing
the histories of the humanities and the sciences together does not mean that the former, like
the latter, cannot or should not be studied separately. On the contrary, as with the history of
other knowledge-making disciplines, the history of the humanities can and will be investigated
in its own right, as will the history of its many subdisciplines. The challenge is to keep thinking
about how the history of the sciences and the history of the humanities may benefit from each
other in the most fruitful way possible.

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