The Humanities

[Charlotte Douglas]

I, for one, grew up understanding that mathematics was one of the
humanities!  And certainly not a "science".  (Of course, I am a bit older
than most people on this list..... Things have probably changed.)

Charlotte Douglas



>The issue is philosophical and therefore cultural. It has to do with how we
>slice knowledge.
>
>I agree with Genevra that most Anglophones today would not place mathematics
>in the humanities. However, there may have been a time when math(s) was
>thought of as part of philosophy (in the broader, older sense of the term,
>as in "Ph.D." and _Principia Mathematica_ by the philosophers Russell and
>Whitehead, published in  1910 -1913). However, most people today would put
>mathematics in the natural sciences. If you take away the universe, what's
>left is mathematics. (I'd appreciate a proper citation to this.)
>
>Economics, on the other hand, can be both a member of the humanities and a
>social science. Marx's _Das Kapital_ and other works are more philosophical.
>Indeed, much of Postmodernism is based his ideas. However, modern Western
>economics is a social science that uses psychometric, probabilistic methods
>and measures human behavior, perhaps even hypothesizing models of how we
>behave. I would imagine that economics was treated as a phiolosophical
>enterprise in Soviet times because of the Leninist co-opting of Marx's
>ideas.
>
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