These are the slides of a talk by Rens Bod presented on January 18, 2012 at WERELD BEELD, Amsterdam University College. The title is: How the Humanities Changed the World, Or why we should stop worrying and love the history of the humanities. The humanities are under severe pressure worldwide. While the humanities have been viewed for centuries as the pinnacle of education, during the last forty years or so the study of art, history, literature, language and music is typically seen as a luxury, both by policy makers and the public. The humanities are an ornamentation of life but useless for technology, economy and industry. Humanities scholars have been unable to come up with a convincing answer to their marginalization. Arguments in favour of the humanities are defensive and get lost in mantra-like repetitions like: the humanistic disciplines are important for self-cultivation (Bildung), they are relevant for cultural and historical consciousness, and they form the basis for critical thinking and democracy. While these arguments may all be true, most scholars overlook the possibility that the assumption behind the image problem itself may be wrong. Humanities scholars seem to have taken for granted that the humanities are economically irrelevant. Yet a quick glance over the history of the humanities shows the opposite: humanistic insights not only radically changed the world but they also resulted in concrete applications. As if humanities scholars have no idea of their own history – or decided to neglect a part of it -- these applications are attributed to the sciences. Here something has to be rectified, where the attack is the best defense.

1. How the Humanities Changed the World
Or why we should stop worrying and love the
history of the humanities
Rens Bod
University of Amsterdam
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation

2. Let’s start with a small survey
 Which disciplines changed the world more
profoundly?
(1) The Humanities
(2) The Sciences

3. The humanities are under great
pressure world-wide
 Humanities are increasingly marginalized and
are viewed by policy makers as useless for
technology and economy
 Most reactions are defensive:
 Critical mind and cultural awareness
 Bildung (self-cultivation)
 Social responsibility (E. Said)
 Democratic consiousness (M. Nussbaum)
 It is often forgotten that the humanities have led
to world-changing insights and discoveries

4. The humanities should guard
themselves against misconceptions
 Insights in the humanities have been attributed
to the sciences – also by humanities scholars!
 Academic institutes, students and scholars have
a responsibility to show the relevance of the
humanities – even if just to survive themselves..
 The comparative history of the humanities is of great
help here

5. The history of the humanities is
largely uninvestigated
E.g. Dutch minister of Science, Culture and
Education, Ronald Plasterk, claimed:
“The humanities write history,
but the sciences make history”
 Is he right or wrong?

6. Definition of ‘humanities’
 W. Dilthey (1911):
 “The humanities study the expressions of the
human mind”
such as the study of music, language, art,
literature, theater, texts…
 In 21st century there are many different ways
to investigate expressions of the human mind
 Not only historical and hermeneutic methods but
also digital methods

7. Humanities vs natural sciences
and social sciences
 Natural sciences study nature
Physics, astronomy,
chemistry, biology,
 Social sciences study human behavior in their
social environment
Psychology, sociology,
anthropology, economics…

8. What is this talk about?
These are my main questions:
 In what way did insights from the humanities
change the world?
 And where do the preconceptions about the
humanities come from?
 Such as: “The humanities are a luxury without
economic impact”
 I will guide you through 25 centuries of history in
25 minutes…
 We should keep in mind that humanities are seen as
separate branch of disciplines only since 19th century

9. Linguistics: notion of
“Grammar” (600 BCE)
 One of the most important discoveries of all time
is the notion of rule-based system for human
language, a ‘grammar’
 A finite number of rules describes all infinitely many
correct (‘grammatical’) sentences
 The Indian linguist Panini developed in 6th
century BCE such a rule-based system for
Sanskrit using the notion of Recursion
 +voc  +len /- +voc +savarNa
 rAma-s- + ShaShTha  rAma-Sh-ShaShTha
 ya-t- + nAsti  ya-n-nAsti etc.

10. Recursion is known as the “Droste effect”

11. The impact of the notion of
‘Recursion’
 Thanks to recursion, a finite number of rules can cover a
infinite number of sentences
 E.g. the sentence: I see the man that hits the cat that is chased
by the dog that is spotted by the photographer that is…
 i.e. the rule for subclauses is used in the rule for subclauses
itself: one can go deeper and deeper using recursion
 Panini’s grammar-formalism was used as a model
for first higher-level programming languages
 ALGOL60, Panini-Backus Normal Form
 Panini’s formalism made ICT formally and technologically
possible!

12. Music theory:
Pythagoras (6th c. BCE)
 Pythagoras not only investigated mathematics
but also music perception
 His discovery: harmonic intervals
(‘consonances’) coincide with simple number
ratios: octave=1/2, fifth=2/3, fourth=3/4
 According to Pythagoras the third was not consonant
(but since late middle ages, the third is perceived as
consonant)

13. “Mind and nature consist of
numbers”
 Pythagoras’s idea to describe musical harmony in terms
of numbers (which Aristoxenus extended to musical
melodies) may have had an even greater impact than
the discovery of ‘grammar’
 Led to the insight that the world
(both mind and nature) can be understood
bu numbers: e.g. Harmony of the Spheres
 This world view emerged from the Study of Music which for a
long time was seen as cosmological

14. Philology: Lorenzo Valla’s
‘discovery’ (1440)
 Philology: on the basis of correspondences and
differences (errors) in variants of transmitted
texts the original (archetype) can be
reconstructed
 The philologist Lorenzo Valla shows in 1440 that
the document “Donatio Constantini” (“The
Donation of Constantine”) is a forgery
 According to this document the Roman emperor
Constantine would have donated the West-
Roman empire in the early 4th c. to the Pope!

15. Impact of Valla’s discovery
 Valla’s discovery caused an enormous shock in
15th and 16th century Europe
 It was taken up by Luther and
and others and was one of the
motives for the Reformation
 The very idea of philological source
reconstruction (Poliziano, Bentley, Lachmann
a.o.) by figuring out the errors in transmission
even influenced biology centuries later (i.e. DNA
analysis – see Dawkins 2008)

16. Underlying idea of source
reconstruction
 When there is an error in a copied document –
e.g. a missing word – then descendents of the
document will have the same common errors
 Thus all variants with a certain error can be traced
back to a common ancestor where this error occurred
for the first time
 If there are more common errors, a genealogical
family tree can be constructed, a stemma

17. Example of a stemma

18. Common errors point at common
ancestors
 Compare this with determining
the heridity of a unique illness or
a DNA sequence that is transmitted
from parents to children
 Deletion, substitution and insertion of words (in texts) and
nucleotides (in DNA) are surprisingly parallel
 The method of reconstructing the original data from copies was
first developed in philology (Lachmann), and later literally
applied in the new booming field of genetics

19. Art theory:
Leon Battista Alberti
 First description of linear perspective (1435)
A representation of reality is achieved by imaginary lines which link
the eye of the artist with the subjects in the depiction and which,
when they are intersected by the picture plane (the window, the
painting), result in the portrayed composition
Alberti’s analysis of perspective
also led to new design techniques
in architecture.
Representations that do not follow
linear perspective are nowadays
perceived as ‘wrong’
(It literally changed our world view)

20. Historiography:
Joseph Scaliger
 Formalization of historical time reckoning (‘chronology’)
on the basis of the principle of oldest source (1606)
 Scaliger discovered from Egyptian sources that there
had been pharao’s living before the Creation of the
World (which according to Bible was estimated at 4000
BC)
 Scaliger tried to ‘save the phenomena’ by placing these pharao’s
in a ‘mythological era’: tempus prolepticon
 Scaliger’s discovery results in a debate about the Bible
as ‘true’ source, which via I. Vossius, La Pereyre and
Spinoza leads to the Enlightenment

21. Interaction between theory
and empiricism
 The early-modern empirical study of art, music
and texts results in a new, critical view on the
world
 Empiricism gets the last word, how beautiful the
theory may be…
 Study of consonance in music theory, perspective in
art theory, and text-reconstruction in philology
influence and shape the early natural sciences
 Influenced especially Galileo, Kepler and Snellius

22. Interaction humanists &
natural scientists
 Thanks to the thorough musical string experiments by
Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei, the combination of
experimental and mathematical research was directly
transmitted to Galileo
 Thus the discovery of the empirical cycle is due to the
15th and 16th century humanists who analyzed texts
and music in a critical and empirical way

23. 19th century Linguistics:
Discovery of Indo-European
 Discovery of sound change
laws (Grimm,1822)
 Hypothesis of Indo-Euro-
pean (1835)
 Evolutionary language tree
(1850)
Possibly influenced Darwin
 Century later: confirmed
by genetic research
(L. Cavalli-Sforza)
 But is also led to the idea of
Arian race…(M. Muller a.o.)

24. Grimm’s sound change law
pbf t d th kgx
↓ ↓ ↓
fbp th t d xkg
↓ ↓ ↓
bfp dzt gxk
Shift from voiceless to voiced consonants
E.g. treis  threis  drei (t  th  d)
Grimm predicted a cycle from voiced back to voiceless!

25. The Computational Shift
in the Humanities
 The Digital Humanities are changing our
world, e.g. computational linguistics:
 Automatic Speech Recognition (bv. Dragon
speech)
 Automatic Translation (bv. Systran, Google
Translate – only useful as intermediate result)
This development would not have been possible
without theoretical linguistics, which brings us back
again to Panini, which reaches via N. Chomsky the
field of computer science and internet technology

26. Discoveries in the humanities that
changed the world
 Linguistics: Panini’s Grammar, theoretical linguistics 
programming languages, Internet revolution
 Music Theory: Pythagoras’ harmonic music theory 
numerological view of the world
 Philology: Valla’s debugging  Reformation,
via stemmatic philology  Genetics
 Art theory: Alberti’s linear perspective revolutionary
design techniques in architecture
 Historiography: Scaliger’s discovery that the earth is older than
according to the Bible  Enlightenment
 All humanities: Discovery interaction between theory and
empiricism  Scientific Revolution
 Computational and
Digital humanities: Many computational applications 
e.g. speech recognition, creative industry

27. Impact of the humanities
The humanities have led to:
Reformation,
Enlightenment,
Scientific Revolution
Genetics
Information technology and
Internet revolution

28. Why are these great humanistic feats not
generally known?
 Two highly influential philosophers W. Dilthey & W.
Windelband wanted to emancipate the humanities
around 1900:
 Natural sciences: focus on explanation (nomothetic)
 Search for the law-like and the universal
 Humanities: focus on understanding (idiographic)
 Seach for the special, the unique
 However, this distinction does not correspond to what many
humanities researchers actually do
 Most humanities researchers are empirical and search for patterns
and regularities in their data. But Dilthey’s idea is still dominant…

29. Humanities suffer from
continuous self-criticism
 Important insights and feats in the humanities are
criticised by humanities researchers themselves…
 Continuous criticism on earlier theories
 Too bad: we are also still teaching and using Newtonian
mechanics even if it is not 100% correct
 Good old theories such as stemmatic philology, historical
source criticism, formal grammar, and music theory must
be kept alive and taught!

30. Example of importance of good old theory:
Historical source analysis
 Historical source analysis & philological
source reconstruction are used for truth-
finding in court
 E.g. International Criminal Court in The Hague
 Discovery of forged sources in genocide research
 The Dutch cabinet Kok II fell in 2002 due to historical
research into the fall of Srebrenica, on the basis of
historical source analysis (NIOD report)

31. Let’s now go for a second survey
 Who has changed their mind about which disciplines
changed the world more profoundly
(humanities/sciences)?

32. Let’s now go for a second survey
 Who has changed their mind about which disciplines
changed the world more profoundly
(humanities/sciences)?
 Perhaps my question could better have been:
Which disciplines changed the world more profoundly?
(1) humanities?
(2) sciences?
(3) the interdisciplinary humanities/sciences/social
sciences?

33. Conclusions
 Insights in the humanities have dramatically
changed the world (for the good and the bad)
 There is no lack of impact
 It is important to know the general history of the
humanities, so as to guard ourselves against
misconceptions against the humanities
 Next to the importance of the humanities for Bildung
etc, we must also stress the world-changing nature of
the humanities to policy-makers!

34. There is a responsibility
for academia
 Stress major turning points in the history of the
humanities and their impact (at parties,
discussions with your parents and friends!)
 Publicize the humanities like scientists do:
 “You can never predict whether certain ideas and
theories will be applied in society or industry”
 “But history shows ‘scientific’ ideas are useful”
 Investigate the history of the humanities!
See upcoming conference The Making of the
Humanities, at KNIR, Rome 2012

35. The Making of the Humanities III
Third International Conference on the History of
the Humanities, 1-3 November 2012, Rome
http://makingofthehumanitiesIII.blogspot.com/

36. For a first attempt of a 'full’ history of
the humanities:
Thank you!