welcome to introduction to humanities I'm Miguel Benitez and I'm your instructor for the course this semester and so I want to go ahead and just start off by introducing us to the subject of the humanities so before we even start to cover the humanities proper as before we even start to look at humanity and ancient civilizations I first want us to consider what are the humanities I often times students come into my class they're taking the humanities because it's a required gen ed course but they really have no idea what they're getting themselves into and so on day one when we're in a face-to-face class that's the question what are the humanities what are you expecting from a course on the humanities and I get various different answers history art those kinds of things and certainly the humanities deal a lot with history and with art but basically the way that kind of our working definition the way that we're going to approach the humanities in this course is by defining it as the formal study of human thought in culture the humanities are the formal study of human thought and culture and so as we think about human thought and culture what are the various disciplines that come into what we call the humanities and there's numerous different disciplines so some of them just to give you an idea archeology art history language literature philosophy religion all of these different disciplines play a role in humanities and many more as well and so as we look at the humanities and now we've got a working definition the formal study of human thought and culture we then ask ourselves well why study the humanities you see we live in an increasingly stem driven world right where science technology engineering and math have kind of become the focal point of Education and so why is it that you would need to take a humanities course in fact especially the way that the job mark it is it seems that less and less jobs would require a kind of humane education an education rooted in the humanities and so I want to go ahead and discuss some of the various different reasons why it is that it's important for us to study the humanities and I want to be careful here because I think a lot of well-meaning teachers and professors have made a mistake of always trying to justify their subject to their students to try and prove that it really is important and I'm going to do something like that here in just a moment but I want us to be careful because I think oftentimes the direction that teachers and professors have gone has has not been the most helpful either for the students or for the way that we view education you see the temptation is to try and argue that your subject area is important because it's useful and I'm going to try and suggest something a little different I am going to suggest the humanities can't be useful and I'll start by discussing that but ultimately I'm not suggesting you should study the humanities because they are useful but rather for a whole different other reason that I'll get to here in a moment so let's look at what the Stanford Humanities Center has to say about why we should study the humanities number one it provides us insights into everything it reads through exploration of the humanities we learn how to think creatively and critically to reason and to ask questions because these skills allow us to gain new insights into everything from poetry and paintings to business models and politics humanistic subjects have been at the heart of a liberal arts education since the ancient Greeks first used them to educate their citizens you'll notice that term in there the liberal arts just for the sake of of clarification here the liberal arts and the humanities are not the same but we are going to use them interchangeably here because they are very much connected and so we'll use them interchangeably here as I introduced the idea of the humanities and its importance number two we study the humanities because it helps us in understanding our world research into the human experience adds to our knowledge about our world through the work of humanities scholars we learn about the values of different cultures about what goes into making a work of art about how history is made their effort to preserve the great accomplishments of the past help us understand the world we live in and give us tools to imagine the future and number three the humanities help in bringing clarity to the future today humanistic knowledge continues to provide the ideal foundation for exploring and understanding the human experience investigating a branch of philosophy might get you thinking about ethical questions learning another language might help you gain an appreciation for the similarities in different cultures contemplating a sculpture might make you think about how an artists life affected her creative decisions reading a book from another region of the world might help you think about the meaning of democracy listening to a history course might help you better understand the past while at the same time offer you a clearer picture of the future the liberal arts set us free and so this is where I want to shift a little bit here the liberal arts the humanities helped set us free so yes they can be useful as what I just read from the Stanford Humanities Center [Music] points out right there there's a usefulness in studying the humanities but I think we need to understand that the liberal arts and the humanities do much more than that for us the liberal arts that word liberal right when we think of the word liberal we should think of the word Liberty so the liberal arts set us free and they are necessary for a free society you see we contrast the liberal arts with the servile arts the liberal arts are the education that would be given to a free human being in the past whereas the servile arts is the kind of education that a servant would get or somebody who was going to be dedicating their life to a particular trade and so what we find is that education is moving more and more towards a kind of servile arts education but we find ourselves in a society that is still for the most part and hopes to be a free society and so we have to realize that in light of that it's important for our citizens it's important for the people to receive a liberal arts education because you are part of a free society and so being part of a free society requires of us in order to maintain that freedom in order to maintain that Liberty that we be able to think critically that we have a familiarity with the liberal arts in order to make the decisions that a free society needs to be able to make there's both a liberal and a conservative and I mean that in a broad sense not necessarily our very narrow Republican and Democrat kind of split that we experienced in the United States today but but more broadly speaking both the liberal argument and a conservative argument for studying the humanities a liberal arts education this is part of the liberal argument allows us to learn how to think for ourselves a liberal arts education also allows us to make progress by learning from stakes the past and a liberal arts education helps us to figure out where to go next the conservative argument well a liberal arts education allows us to preserve the best and greatest ideas of Western civilization and a liberal arts education allows us to value and honor our traditions and so all of these different reasons that I've presented are reasons why we should study the humanities and in many ways it's still a focus on why the humanities are useful but I'm going to suggest that the primary reason we should study humanities is because we are human and that is what the what humans do to study the humanities and participate in the humanities is part of what it means to be human and so we study the humanities in order to become and to be more fully human the humanities are driven by a couple of key questions and those key questions we will see come up over and over and over again one of the key questions is who are we right sometimes it appears as what is man what does it mean to be human what is human nature that's what we're getting it right what does it mean to be human how how are humans distinct different unique from all the other animals and number two what is the good what is the purpose of life what is the good life what is it that humans ought to be doing what is it that humans ought to be pursuing right how do humans flourish in light of their answer to question number and so we'll see these key questions come up over and over again and we'll see various different thinkers from the past attempt to answer these questions as we seek to try and gain a better understanding of the answers to those questions now when I raised those questions and I know for some of you and certainly for our society many people think well we can't really agree on answers to those questions it's all a matter of perspective and I want to suggest to you that we ought to resist this kind of thinking in fact I think it's one of the reasons that we find ourselves in a kind of crisis of the humanities and the crisis of the humanities is that we have largely bought into skepticism and skepticism is the belief that we can't know anything for sure we can't know anything for sure sometimes it's a little more modest than that I can't know anything for sure though most times that ends up getting projected out and saying I can't know anything for sure and neither can you and then there's also other versions of this skepticism sometimes found in religion that says I can't know anything at all so I must just believe and so unfortunately the humanities have appealed to skepticism in an attempt to preserve its place in the Academy and so we can't know anything for sure and so the humanities is just another realm in which we talk about ideas and opinions and tastes but nobody can really know for sure I remember once having a conversation with someone and they asked me what it was that I was studying and I mentioned I've always kind of studied interdisciplinary kind of education but one of the areas of focus for me has been philosophy and so I remember telling this person and I was studying some philosophy and they said oh I I loved philosophy in college because it's the one class in which there are no right or wrong answers that's skepticism that's skepticism but when you're trying to preserve the humanities in a world that says unless you're useful you're useless pushing into skepticism of saying well we can't really know anything for sure at all anyway is an attempt i rana CLE to try and preserve its place in the academy because if we can't know anything then it's not just the humanities we can't know anything in but we can't know anything in any discipline for sure and so I want to suggest that this is a grave mistake one that many people have bought into not only should we reject skepticism in the humanities we should reject skepticism at all there is no form of skepticism but I want to make a distinction between skepticism and then being skeptical right I do want to make that distinction being skeptical can be a really good practice right being skeptical means you ask questions you don't just accept what people tell you you want evidence you want reasons to believe something and there's nothing wrong with that but skepticism is to say that we can't know anything for sure and so how can we know something for sure if I'm suggesting we should reject skepticism then how is it that we come to know things for sure well what we'll see and I'll go over this in more detail down the road is that throughout the history of thought there have been two camps one which is empiricism which says that all knowledge comes by way of the senses ultimately and the other rationalism which says that all knowledge ultimately comes by way of reason and so what we find is that as more and more people have embraced empiricism the idea that well I know things because I see it with my eyes what we come to find out is that sometimes our senses play tricks on us sometimes what we think we saw isn't actually there and I'm sure all of you have experienced something like that and so then that raises the question how can it be that when something looked so real it wasn't actually there if that happens then can we really know for sure how do we know our senses aren't playing tricks on us all the time and so we fall into skepticism so it is my suggestion that a solution is found in at least some form of rationalism not all rationalism just like not all empiricism is the same and so how can we know things for sure well by beginning by that which is most basic we start with the laws of thought the laws of thought cannot be denied they must be true and those basic laws of thought are one the law of identity which states that a is a a dog is a dog a unicorn's a unicorn a human is a human so a is a if we deny that a is a or if we deny that we can know that a is a we have lost all meaning and anything that we say has no basis we must accept the law of identity it is self-evident number two the law of non-contradiction this says the a cannot be both a and not a at the same time in the same way there cannot be any square circles we know this for sure there cannot be any married bachelors again we know this for sport and I don't have to look at every single bachelor in the world in order to determine that there are no married bachelors by definition there cannot be a married bachelor and then lastly we have the law of excluded middle a is either a or non a so dog is either dog or not dog person is either person or not person and so with these three guiding laws of thought we can begin to test things for meaning and we can begin to reason to figure out what is true and what isn't true so when we look at questions like what does it mean to be human and what is the good we can begin to test what others have proposed by examining them according to the laws of thought according to consistency with what we know to be true and so I'm gonna go ahead and close this out now next time we'll be looking at chapter 1 which is the prehistoric past and early civilizations