A Philosophy of the Humanities

Stephen R. Grimm is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Fordham University in New York. He is Series Editor for the Oxford University Press series "Guides to the Good Life," and author of Varieties of Understanding (2019) and Making Sense of the World (2017). He is a Lifetime Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University.Rik Peels is University Research Chair in Analytic and Interdisciplinary Philosophy of Religion at the Department of Beliefs and Practices and the Philosophy Department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is also a Senior Research Associate at the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science at the University of Johannesburg in South-Africa. He is the author of numerous books, including Ignorance (2023), and Responsible Belief (2016). He currently leads an ERC-funded project on Extreme Beliefs: The Epistemology and Ethics of Fundamentalism.René van Woudenberg is Dean of theFaculty of Humanities and Professor at CLUE+, the Interfaculty Research Institute for Culture, Cognition, History, and Hertiage at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Common-Sense Philosophy (2020), and Scientism: Prospects and Problems (2018).

This excellent book offers a wide-ranging, accessibly written, and crucially important philosophical engagement of the nature of the humanities, achieving clarity about what has been an historically unwieldly categorization of disciplines to establish grounds for a philosophy of the humanities on par with that of science. Invaluable for scholars and students across disciplines, this study illuminates the distinctive possibilities for human self-knowledge and wisdom enabled by the humanities, illuminating and supporting their importance to academic and cultural life today.

• PrefaceChapter 1: Philosophy of the Humanities: What and Why?Chapter 2: The Objects of the HumanitiesChapter 3: The Epistemic Goals of the HumanitiesChapter 4: Authority and Deference in the HumanitiesChapter 5: Methods and Interpretation in the HumanitiesChapter 6: Perspectives, Social Constructions, Standpoints, and Truth in the HumanitiesChapter 7: The Humanities and Political AimsChapter 8: Progress in the HumanitiesChapter 9: Replication in the HumanitiesChapter 10: The Future of the Philosophy of the Humanities BibliographyIndex