The Humanities

[Loren A. Billings]

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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