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Progress and Values in the Humanities: Comparing Culture and Science
Author(s): Volney Gay (Author)
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication Date: 1 Nov. 2009
- Edition: Illustrated
- Language: English
- Print length: 288 pages
- ISBN-10: 0231147902
- ISBN-13: 9780231147903
Book Description
Money and support tend to flow in the direction of economics, science, and other academic departments that demonstrate measurable “progress.” The humanities, on the other hand, offer more abstract and uncertain outcomes. A humanist’s objects of study are more obscure in certain ways than pathogens and cells. Consequently, it seems as if the humanities never truly progress. Is this a fair assessment? By comparing objects of science, such as the brain, the galaxy, the amoeba, and the quark, with objects of humanistic inquiry, such as the poem, the photograph, the belief, and the philosophical concept, Volney Gay reestablishes a fundamental distinction between science and the humanities. He frees the latter from its pursuit of material-based progress and restores its disciplines to a place of privilege and respect. Using the metaphor of magnification, Gay shows that, while we can investigate natural objects to the limits of imaging capacity, magnifying cultural objects dissolves them into noise. In other words, cultural objects can be studied only within their contexts and through the prism of metaphor and narrative. Gathering examples from literature, art, film, philosophy, religion, science, and psychoanalysis, Gay builds a new justification for the humanities. By revealing the unseen and making abstract ideas tangible, the arts create meaningful wholes, which itself is a form of progress.
Editorial Reviews
Review
An interdisciplinary book that itself serves as an eloquent example of why the humanities are priceless… Essential.– “Choice”
About the Author
Volney Gay is professor of religion, psychiatry, and anthropology at Vanderbilt University and is a training analyst at the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of six other books, including Freud on Sublimation: Reconsiderations; Joy and the Objects of Psychoanalysis: Literature, Belief, and Neurosis; and Reading Jung: Science, Psychology, and Religion.
