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this, i think, is what he's addressing. if you don't see value in humanities or the arts, i'm afraid you're completely missing the point of being alive. a wor

this, i think, is what he's addressing. if you don't see value in humanities or the arts, i'm afraid you're completely missing the point of being alive. a world run completely by engineers is no place i want to live.

cholantesh 11y ago
The point of being alive is being forced to spend exorbitant sums of money for the privilege of being talked down to by someone whose entire life is spent in an ivory tower about a subject whose value s/he can't articulate without resorting to esoteric vagaries?
- lintiness 11y ago
  who's holding a gun to your head? a guy who's read and studied source materials for decades knows more about authorial intent or historical context than you; i'd bet he has an understanding worth thinking about and considering.
Thriptic 11y ago
I agree that the humanities and arts are of profound importance. I've found that the problem with these subjects is often simply how they are taught. Philosophy is a great example. I was one credit shy of a philosophy minor in undergrad. The entire purpose of philosophy is to provide actionable guidelines for how to live life, yet none of my classes actually provided students with this information. Instead, a lecturer would drone on about academicians' opinions on various doctrines, their historical context, and critique each doctrine from a logical perspective without any group discussion or talk of application. Students were then asked to regurgitate the professor's opinions in an essay. It was boring, and eventually I quit. Imagine if all chemistry classes were just the classroom side of organic chemistry, with people sitting in rooms memorizing syntheses and electron pushing without ever even talking about stepping into a lab. Would anyone be surprised if those students then said they thought chemistry was boring?
- maus42 11y ago
  >The entire purpose of philosophy is to provide actionable guidelines for how to live life ...I thought it was about trying to find truth, and knowledge, and wisdom for the sake of love of them. What is reality? How it exists? What it means? And anyway, how we can we understand any of it? What it means to understand it? The whole idea of natural science of the important child of Western philosophy. History of philosophy is a beautiful example how most of the purported "actionable guidelines" turn out quite hokey in a closer inspection.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    >...I thought it was about trying to find truth, and knowledge, and wisdom for the sake of love of them. What is reality? How it exists? What it means? And anyway, how we can we understand any of it? What it means to understand it? Why do people think they can even formulate these sorts of question with rigor and precision if they lack life experience and knowledge of how nature works? Why should we expect that the world is comprehensible from an armchair in a liberal-arts college?
    - dgacmu 11y ago
      You seem to be asking whether it is possible to derive truth a priori by logic, or whether truth is dependent upon the physical context in which it's found. Perhaps the answer is a combination of both. Perhaps I just paraphrased Kant - and perhaps you just asked an interesting question that was raised hundreds of years ago by people in armchairs. ;)
      - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
        > Perhaps I just paraphrased Kant - and perhaps you just asked an interesting question that was raised hundreds of years ago by people in armchairs. ;) You were of course paraphrasing Kant, and the very fact that the question remains, from the point of view of professional academic philosophy, unsettled hundreds of years later speaks very loudly about the inadequacy of armchair speculation as a guide to truth.
cbd1984 11y ago
If you think undergraduate electives are "The Humanities" you're part of the problem you decry.
- lintiness 11y ago
  i attended the university of chicago. my electives were what i wanted; my core was humanities, civ, arts, social sciences, science, language. i haven't decried any problem. the professor who wrote this piece is a bloviating whiner, but he also happens to be mostly right.
  - gtrubetskoy 11y ago
    isn't the uchicago college core more of an exception that the rule these days?
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
> if you don't see value in humanities or the arts Who said that "humanities or the arts" is, or should be, the exclusive province of academics in the humanities and arts who've never thought about anything else? Self-referential meta-study always seemed a bit... depressingly pointless to me.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
Hey, let's not go so binary, shall we? Personally, I want the world to be run by engineers, because they're the intersection of actually knowing stuff about reality (hard science) and using knowledge to fix problems (trades). I also want them to be connected to the human side of the world. Which is what naturally happens with smart people, unless you spend their childhood teaching them humanities are bullshit - which is what our schools excel at. Out of people interested in humanities that I know, the best ones at it are engineers. On the other hand, I also meet people with liberal arts background who are keen to learn more about hard science and building stuff, and they are good at it. What we really need to fix is the perception of humanities, and we can do so by trimming all the accumulated bullshit. We should do the same with some areas of harder fields, like medicine, while we're at it.
jqm 11y ago
I beg to differ. I'd love to live in a world run by engineers.

cholantesh 11y ago

The point of being alive is being forced to spend exorbitant sums of money for the privilege of being talked down to by someone whose entire life is spent in an ivory tower about a subject whose value s/he can't articulate without resorting to esoteric vagaries?

lintiness 11y ago
who's holding a gun to your head? a guy who's read and studied source materials for decades knows more about authorial intent or historical context than you; i'd bet he has an understanding worth thinking about and considering.

Thriptic 11y ago

I agree that the humanities and arts are of profound importance. I've found that the problem with these subjects is often simply how they are taught. Philosophy is a great example. I was one credit shy of a philosophy minor in undergrad. The entire purpose of philosophy is to provide actionable guidelines for how to live life, yet none of my classes actually provided students with this information. Instead, a lecturer would drone on about academicians' opinions on various doctrines, their historical context, and critique each doctrine from a logical perspective without any group discussion or talk of application. Students were then asked to regurgitate the professor's opinions in an essay. It was boring, and eventually I quit. Imagine if all chemistry classes were just the classroom side of organic chemistry, with people sitting in rooms memorizing syntheses and electron pushing without ever even talking about stepping into a lab. Would anyone be surprised if those students then said they thought chemistry was boring?

maus42 11y ago
>The entire purpose of philosophy is to provide actionable guidelines for how to live life ...I thought it was about trying to find truth, and knowledge, and wisdom for the sake of love of them. What is reality? How it exists? What it means? And anyway, how we can we understand any of it? What it means to understand it? The whole idea of natural science of the important child of Western philosophy. History of philosophy is a beautiful example how most of the purported "actionable guidelines" turn out quite hokey in a closer inspection.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >...I thought it was about trying to find truth, and knowledge, and wisdom for the sake of love of them. What is reality? How it exists? What it means? And anyway, how we can we understand any of it? What it means to understand it? Why do people think they can even formulate these sorts of question with rigor and precision if they lack life experience and knowledge of how nature works? Why should we expect that the world is comprehensible from an armchair in a liberal-arts college?
  - dgacmu 11y ago
    You seem to be asking whether it is possible to derive truth a priori by logic, or whether truth is dependent upon the physical context in which it's found. Perhaps the answer is a combination of both. Perhaps I just paraphrased Kant - and perhaps you just asked an interesting question that was raised hundreds of years ago by people in armchairs. ;)
    - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
      > Perhaps I just paraphrased Kant - and perhaps you just asked an interesting question that was raised hundreds of years ago by people in armchairs. ;) You were of course paraphrasing Kant, and the very fact that the question remains, from the point of view of professional academic philosophy, unsettled hundreds of years later speaks very loudly about the inadequacy of armchair speculation as a guide to truth.

cbd1984 11y ago

If you think undergraduate electives are "The Humanities" you're part of the problem you decry.

lintiness 11y ago
i attended the university of chicago. my electives were what i wanted; my core was humanities, civ, arts, social sciences, science, language. i haven't decried any problem. the professor who wrote this piece is a bloviating whiner, but he also happens to be mostly right.
- gtrubetskoy 11y ago
  isn't the uchicago college core more of an exception that the rule these days?

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

> if you don't see value in humanities or the arts Who said that "humanities or the arts" is, or should be, the exclusive province of academics in the humanities and arts who've never thought about anything else? Self-referential meta-study always seemed a bit... depressingly pointless to me.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

Hey, let's not go so binary, shall we? Personally, I want the world to be run by engineers, because they're the intersection of actually knowing stuff about reality (hard science) and using knowledge to fix problems (trades). I also want them to be connected to the human side of the world. Which is what naturally happens with smart people, unless you spend their childhood teaching them humanities are bullshit - which is what our schools excel at. Out of people interested in humanities that I know, the best ones at it are engineers. On the other hand, I also meet people with liberal arts background who are keen to learn more about hard science and building stuff, and they are good at it. What we really need to fix is the perception of humanities, and we can do so by trimming all the accumulated bullshit. We should do the same with some areas of harder fields, like medicine, while we're at it.

jqm 11y ago

I beg to differ. I'd love to live in a world run by engineers.