Humanities

==History==
In the West, the history of the humanities can be traced to ancient Greece, as the basis of a broad education for citizens.<ref>Bod, Rens; ''A New History of the Humanities'', Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014.</ref> During Roman times, the concept of the seven [[liberal arts]] evolved, involving [[grammar]], [[rhetoric]] and [[logic]] (the [[trivium (education)|trivium]]), along with [[arithmetic]], [[geometry]], [[astrology and astronomy|astronomy]] and [[music]] (the [[quadrivium]]).<ref>Levi, Albert W.; ''The Humanities Today'', Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1970.</ref> These subjects formed the bulk of [[medieval]] education, with the emphasis being on the humanities as skills or "ways of doing".

A major shift occurred with the [[Renaissance humanism]] of the fifteenth century, when the humanities began to be regarded as subjects to study rather than practice, with a corresponding shift away from traditional fields into areas such as literature and history (''studia humaniora''). In the 20th century, this view was in turn challenged by the [[postmodernism|postmodernist]] movement, which sought to redefine the humanities in more [[egalitarianism|egalitarian]] terms suitable for a [[democracy|democratic]] society since the Greek and Roman societies in which the humanities originated were not at all democratic.<ref>Walling, Donovan R.; ''Under Construction: The Role of the Arts and Humanities in Postmodern Schooling'' Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, Bloomington, Indiana, 1997. Humanities comes from human</ref>

A distinction is usually drawn between the [[social science]]s and the humanities. Classicist [[Allan Bloom]] writes in ''[[The Closing of the American Mind]]'' (1987):
{{blockquote|Social science and humanities have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as [[Philistinism|philistine]]. […] The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Bloom |first=Allan |title=The Closing of the American Mind |date=2012 |publisher=Simon and Schuster |isbn=978-1-4516-8320-2 |pages=357}}</ref>}}