HUMANITIES

those branches of knowledge that concern themselves with human beings and their culture or with analytic and critical methods of inquiry derived from an appreciation of human values and of the unique ability of the human spirit to express itself. As a group of educational disciplines, the humanities are distinguished in content and method from the physical and biological sciences and, somewhat less decisively, from the social sciences. The humanities include the study of all languages and literatures, the arts, history, and philosophy. The humanities are sometimes organized as a school or administrative division in many colleges and universities in the United States. The modern conception of the humanities has its origin in the classical Greek paideia, a course of general education dating from the sophists in the mid-5th century BC, which prepared young men for active citizenship in the polis, or city-state; and in Cicero's humanitas (literally, human nature), a program of training proper for orators, first set forth in De Oratore (Of the Orator) in 55 BC. In the early Middle Ages the Church Fathers, including St. Augustine, himself a rhetorician, adapted paideia and humanitasor the bonae (good), or liberales (liberal), arts, as they were also calledto a program of basic Christian education; mathematics, linguistic and philological studies, and some history, philosophy, and science were included. The word humanitas, although not the substance of its component disciplines, dropped out of common use in the later Middle Ages but underwent a flowering and a transformation in the Renaissance. The term studia humanitatis (studies of humanity) was used by 15th-century Italian humanists to denote secular literary and scholarly activities (in grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, moral philosophy, and ancient Greek and Latin studies) that the humanists thought to be essentially humane and classical studies rather than divine ones. In the 18th century, Denis Diderot and the French Encyclopdistes censured studia humanitatis for what they claimed had by then become its dry, exclusive concentration on Latin and Greek texts and language. By the 19th century, when the purview of the humanities expanded, the humanities had begun to take their identity not so much from their separation from the realm of the divine as from their exclusion of the material and methods of the maturing physical sciences, which tended to examine the world and its phenomena objectively, without reference to human meaning and purpose.