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humanities |
Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Legal, Acronyms, Wikipedia, Hutchinson | 0.02 sec. |
humanitiesBranches of knowledge that investigate human beings, their culture, and their self-expression. Distinguished from the physical and biological sciences and, sometimes, from the social sciences, the humanities include the study of languages and literatures, the arts, history, and philosophy. The modern conception of the humanities has roots in the classical Greek paideia, a course in general education dating from the 5th century BC that prepared young men for citizenship. It also draws on Cicero's humanitas, a program of training for orators set forth in 55 BC. The Renaissance humanists contrasted studia humanitatis (“studies of humanity”) with studies of the divine; by the 19th century the distinction was instead drawn between the humanities and the sciences. How to thank TFD for its existence? Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, add the site to iGoogle, or visit webmaster's page for free fun content. |
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| And so keenly did men feel the human interests of such things as were now taught, that we have come to call grammar, rhetoric, poetry, Greek and Latin the Humanities, and the professor who teaches these thing the professor of Humanity. "I fancy," he said, "that I was a fairly average person--I mean that I was possessed of an average share of the humanities. A genial centenarian, whose years have told happily on him, he appreciates not only those humanities of feeling and habit which were peculiar to the last century and passed away with it, but also that permanent humanity which has but undergone a change of surface in the new world of our own, wholly different though it may look. |
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