Worthwhile article about the abandonment of the Humanities "canon" and the decline of the Humanities in the process. This suggests that any discipline needs some kind of canon even if, as in -and especially- the natural sciences, this canon necessarily should be revised on a regular basis. You would think that for the Humanities some things are immune from replacement, like Shakespeare, Renaissance art by masters such as Raphael, Dryden's poetry, Beethoven's symphonies, the art and architecture of Chartres Cathedral, Mark Twain, Chagall, the drama of Eugene O'Neill, American Jazz, and the Bible as literature -even if the Bible can also be taught as history, religion, and, as well, philosophy ( Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus, Proverbs, extended passages in the book of Romans, etc ). Alas, this has not been true. Because of the absence of women authors from the canon (minus a few exceptions such as 'George Sand' and Madame de Stael), absence of African-Americans (also a few exceptions), Asians, etc, it has been deemed necessary to replace parts of the canon with, IMHO, "lesser" creations that are taken to better represent American diversity. There is something to be said for this departure. Personally I think we are better off when various Asians, especially, are included: Hakuin, the Japanese Zen Buddhist monk-scholar-poet-artist is a good example, Hindu literature such as the Upanishads offers value, Chinese art certainly does, and so does Omar Khayyam, sitar music of India, the arts of Thailand, and the charming philosophical writing of a Zoroastrian named Burzoe. You can also make a valid case for various visual arts of Africa, music of Latin America (like Andean pan pipe music), and the wood sculpture of Melanesia. But after these examples, the available corpus of creations, while it has a certain interest and some things are world class by any standards, gets rather thin, rather fast. And that is how it is and has been. So, why pretend otherwise? One of my college courses was World Literature. And I'm glad I took the class. I think I am far more sensitive to good quality non-Western creative work than would otherwise have been true. Yet I also took a class in Shakespeare. ]There is a good chance his plays were actually written by the Earl of Oxford, but in any case the compositions are utterly fantastic, there is nothing comparable. If continued value to "Shakespeare" is important, if this means that minority authors are under-represented, if women are under-represented, well, objectively, why is this an issue? Some women and some minorities are represented, it is anything but the case that they are excluded on principle. If a disproportionate number of white males contributed most to the Humanities, so they did, and good for them. How about recognition based on merit, not affirmative action? ----- This leads to the thought that maybe we should start to think about a Radical Centrist canon. This, it seems to me, necessarily should be based on merit. To use an obvious example, we should give all due credit to Mark Satin, even if we disagree with any number of his particular views. But should we demand 1 : 1 balance and give equal time to women Radical Centrists ? Who might they even be? Marylin Ferguson certainly deserves full recognition for her work in developing the concept that became RC, she is objectively important. But who else? There is no female equivalent to Mark Satin, or to Ted Halstead, or Michael Lind, or anyone else who has written what we can consider to be Radical Centrist texts. Nor is there an African-American equivalent even if some of Thomas Sowell's work more-or-less takes us into RC thought. As for Asians, to say the least, I am 100% in favor of including each and every Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Burmese , etc, we can find We know about one notable advocate of RC who has India background in the USA and there is another in Great Britain, but we still are waiting for someone from Tokyo or Jakarta. The moment someone like that comes to our attention, so much the better. But let's always be objective about everything. Billy ------------------------------------------------- posted on: _Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog_ (http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/) How the humanities (though not philosophy!) helped create its own "decline" _Provocative piece _ (http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/cura-te-ipsum/) by Alex Rosenberg (Duke), and one worth reflecting on. An excerpt: For the problems of the humanities are self-inflicted wounds well recognized by their colleagues in other faculties. First, over the last two generations the humanities (except for philosophy) have lost faith with their callings as the bearers of a continuous cultural inheritance–a canon, for want of a better word. They have viewed the need to widen their curricula as a zero sum game, in which the entrance of more women, underrepresented minorities, nonwestern peoples has required the exclusion of more dead white dudes. Maybe it has. But the result has been an advanced curriculum their students find foreign and their colleagues educated before this sea change cannot appreciate. The “boutique” courses they teach in their majors, the heavy doses of “theory” they lay on in graduate classes, make it difficult to connect with their students in ways that would provide the purpose, meaning, appreciation of complexity, or recognition of adversity that [proponents of the humanities] hope for. Second, too many humanists, especially those with tenure and graduate programs to tend to, have also ceased to teach fundamental skills to the undergraduates they share with colleagues in the sciences. Teaching writing was long ago hived off from the permanent fulltime tenured faculty in English departments, literature departments, journalism and communication schools, to writing programs, to composition classes taught by teaching assistants, adjunct instructors, “writing fellows"... Similarly, the faculty in the foreign languages have rationally decided that their “research” and the preparation of the next generation of university scholars is far more important than teaching introductory Spanish, or French or German. Indeed, many hold themselves unqualified to do it.... We can’t really blame humanities faculty for their priorities. The incentive structure of the tenure system is as much to blame for the disconnect between what most students need and what tenured humanities faculty are rewarded for doing.... Defenders of the humanities draw lines in the sand, daring science to cross them. Then, when physics, biology or psychology begins to illuminate domains previously left to theology, or philosophy, or novelists like Virginia Wolfe, humanists loose more credibility among students who know some science. Why should they take advanced classes from people who sound like scolds or in some cases even charlatans? Philosophy, at least analytical philosophy–has been something of an exception to the enrollment crisis of the humanities. Its other differences from the rest of the humanities provide evidence that their problems stem from these three self-inflicted wounds. Philosophy has never surrendered its canon: we are still teaching Plato, Hume, Kant, along with Amartya Sen, Judy Thomson and Ruth Marcus. Senior faculty still value and often teach “baby” logic, the foundation of all reasoning in the humanities as well as science. Philosophers who take an interest in science know enough of it to convince scientists that the conceptual problems they locate in biology or physics are real. But philosophy doesn’t pretend it can supersede science as a mode of knowledge. Maybe these are the reasons why many science students still take our advanced classes....
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