Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

For science, only knowledge from scientific methods or research is valid. Understandings from the humanities are discounted; subjectivity and subjective knowledge have no place. But people are concerned about and comprised of their experiences: past and present, waking and sleeping, thinking and feeling, interpersonal events and private ideas and fantasies. From the 1950s into the 1980s, dynamic psychologies infused these concerns with knowledge and sophistication. After WWII, science, scientific objectivity, and empiricism, plus a denigration of subjectivity, rode the success of medical science to increasing influence in Western society. By the mid-80s, science as a social force drove from favor previously successful everyday psychological sophistication. Science has taken the place of religion before the Renaissance. Devotion to STEM implies nothing else is important. This emphasis has had a malignant effect on the teaching and study of the humanities. Medicine about persons and relationships, not only the body, is case in point in which science reigns supreme and technology overrides human concerns. Scientific medicine implies that science makes the diagnosis and treats the patient. The humanities offer liberation from the tyranny of science. Medicine is constituted by physicians as persons caring for patients as persons. The humanities teach about persons, emphasizing their relationships, historical being, aesthetic nature, constant search for meaning, and drive for freedom. Science values sameness, but individuals differ one from another in every respect. This paper considers how teaching the humanities provides depth, rigor, and humanistic knowledge to thinking about people as human beings, not just human bodies.