Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 23, 2001

Volume 29, Number 23

University's longstanding focus on humanities

The role of the humanities at Yale, in higher education and in the nation will be explored in a symposium on Friday and Saturday, March 30 and 31.

Sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center, "Beginning with the Humanities" is part of the University's Tercentennial celebration. All events, which are free and open to the public, will take place at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St.

Yale, established in 1701 as a school to train young men for leadership in church and public life, was devoted almost exclusively to the humanities in its early days. Latin, some Greek and (for more advanced students) Hebrew were central, along with scholastic logic, ethics, metaphysics, and some arithmetic and surveying. Over the decades, the natural sciences and, later, the social sciences were added to this curriculum.

Yale has remained, perhaps uniquely among major American research universities, centrally committed to the humanities, says Peter Brooks, director of the Whitney Humanities Center and Sterling Professor of French and Comparative Literature. However, he adds, "in today's culture, dominated by scientific and technological modes of thought, the humanities can survive only by maintaining an informed dialogue with other disciplines. So our symposium is devoted to 'the humanities AND ...' -- the relations of humanistic thinking and interpretation to research paradigms in other fields, including science and social science, law, theology, architecture."

Yale and its history will serve as the starting point for discussion, but the symposium will take a broad view of the past, present and future of the humanities in the American university and in public life.

Participants will include philosophers Susan Haack, Martha Nussbaum and Stanley Cavell; Yale trustee and former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke; Catharine Stimpson, dean of the Graduate School at New York University; journalists and social critics Nicholas Lemann, Louis Menand and Daniel Yergin; legal scholar Deborah Rhode; literary scholars Barbara Johnson, Jonathan Culler and Wendy Steiner; biologist Peter Galison; and political scientists James Farr and Daniel Rodgers, as well as other distinguished scholars and writers. Participants from Yale include David Apter, David Bromwich, David Brion Davis, John Demos, Owen Fiss, Paul Fry, Glenda Gilmore, Geoffrey Hartman, Michael Holquist, Margaret Homans, Edmund Morgan, Rogers Smith and Günther Wagner.

The symposium will begin at 9:45 a.m. on Friday with a welcome address by President Richard C. Levin. Topics to be explored during that day and the times each will be addressed are "Enlightenments: Defining Moments at Yale," 10 a.m.-12:15 p.m.; "The Interpretive Turn: Philology and Criticism," 1:30-3:30 p.m.; and "Darkness and Truth: Enlightenment and Inequality in the Social Sciences and History," 3:45-5:45 p.m. A reception will follow at 5:45 p.m.

Saturday's discussions are "Epistemology and Uncertainty in the Sciences and Humanities," 10 a.m.-noon, and "The Public Face of the Humanities," 1:30-3:30 p.m. Concluding remarks will be offered by Stanley Cavell at 3:45 p.m.

For further information, call (203) 432-0670.

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