Review #13 of 2023: Future of the Humanities by Walter Kaufmann
For a book that was written in the 1970s about university humanities departments, this book rang surprisingly clear for my experience in Scientific Academia in the 2020s. Kaufmann’s primary thrust with this book was to ask the question: what is the purpose of humanities? He also attempts to give his own answer to that question, as well as critique the answers of the current system.
Kaufmann’s reasons for the teaching of the humanities is fourfold: preservation of the greatest works of humanity, reflection on major philosophical issues (death, justice, spirituality), cultivation of vision & culture shock: exposing students to ways of thinking that are not their own, or of their culture at all.
I found all of this surprisingly relevant to my modern experience in academic biology. In biology, there is also the question of goals, which I feel like has not been adequately answered by the departments in which I have worked. Why are we studying things like phase separation of RNA bodies, or the synaptonemnal complex in C. elegans? What purpose does knowing about these things serve, other than to very vaguely “advance our knowledge”? Yet I cannot voice these concerns in lab meetings or department seminars. As in philosophy, the question of goals has kind of become a dirty phrase in biology, probably because much of the…
