Progress in the humanities? : comparing the objects of culture and science / Volney Gay.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gay, Volney P. (Volney Patrick), 1948-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Science and the humanities.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (248 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, c2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Money and support tend to flow in the direction of economics, science, and other academic departments that demonstrate measurable "progress." The humanities, on the other hand, offer more abstract and uncertain outcomes. A humanist's objects of study are more obscure in certain ways than pathogens and cells. Consequently, it seems as if the humanities never truly progress. Is this a fair assessment?By comparing objects of science, such as the brain, the galaxy, the amoeba, and the quark, with objects of humanistic inquiry, such as the poem, the photograph, the belief, and the philosophical concept, Volney Gay reestablishes a fundamental distinction between science and the humanities. He frees the latter from its pursuit of material-based progress and restores its disciplines to a place of privilege and respect. Using the metaphor of magnification, Gay shows that, while we can investigate natural objects to the limits of imaging capacity, magnifying cultural objects dissolves them into noise. In other words, cultural objects can be studied only within their contexts and through the prism of metaphor and narrative. Gathering examples from literature, art, film, philosophy, religion, science, and psychoanalysis, Gay builds a new justification for the humanities. By revealing the unseen and making abstract ideas tangible, the arts create meaningful wholes, which itself is a form of progress.

Contents:

Humanists and their subject matters

The task of the humanities: looking into the deep

A new answer

Magnifying truths: two slide shows

Searching for the hero: the one who knows

Large-scale research in the humanities

20mule team

Choir

Sports team

Lifeboat

Distributed computing

Big science

Skunk works: discovery at the edges

Self-understanding as the object of humanistic research

Deep language: the anxiety of translation

Magnification and cultural objects

Fantasies of depth: magnifying cultural objects

Horizontal analyses in art criticism

Psychotherapy: part science, part humanities, mostly art

John Updike, rabbit reruns

Science, art, metapsychology, and magnification

Back to Freud, back to the Greeks!

What counts as progress in the humanities?

Progress in Greek philosophy, literature, and mathematics

Development and progress in Greek sculpture

Greek literature, more serious than history

Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus

Progress in Greek mathematics: incommensurability

Seven of nine and five of nine

Science fiction and psychiatry

Mapping the boundaries of human being

Diagnosing the borderline personality: five of nine symptoms

On the pleasures of science fiction: jumping into the abyss

Progress as development of the self: from Greek cult to Greek theater

Canals on mars: exploring imaginary worlds

Virtual civilizations: Percival Lowell and the Martian Canals

Pathological science: the limits of vision

ESP at Duke: the story of J. Rhine

Cargo cults and the ethics of science

Thomas MacAulay and English destiny: history as grand narrative

Searching for essences: Freud and Wittgenstein

Seeing into the psyche: Freud's diagrams

Wittgenstein and sharp focusing

Magnifying truths in philosophical investigations

The magnification fantasy and ideological leanings

Cultural artifacts and reductionism

Learning about the self: new horizons

Seeing with the brain

Learning from the market: reason as an interpersonal process

High art and the power to guess the unseen from the seen

Does high art convey knowledge?

Tragedy and mourning as progress

The power to guess the unseen from the seen

Reality testing as an intrapsychic process

Looking outward, three movies

Blow up

High anxiety

The conversation

Isolating valid signals, making the right cut

Magnification in humanistic theory.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786613789433

9781281735430

1281735434

9780231519816

0231519818

OCLC:

826476324