Humanities

Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the time. Today, the humanities are more frequently defined as any fields of study outside of natural sciences, social sciences, formal sciences (like mathematics), and applied sciences (or professional training).[1] They use methods that are primarily critical, or speculative, and have a significant historical element[2]—as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences.[2]

Part of a series on
Research
Research design Research proposal Research question Writing Argument Referencing
Research strategy Interdisciplinary Multimethodology Qualitative Art-based Quantitative
Methodology Action research Art methodology Critical theory Feminism Grounded theory Hermeneutics Historiography Narrative inquiry Phenomenology Pragmatism Scientific method
Methods Case study Content analysis Descriptive statistics Discourse analysis Ethnography Autoethnography Experiment Field experiment Social experiment Quasi-experiment Field research Historical method Inferential statistics Interviews Mapping Cultural mapping Phenomenography Secondary research Bibliometrics Literature review Meta-analysis Scoping review Systematic review Scientific modelling Simulation Survey
Tools and software Argument technology Geographic information system software Library and information science software Bibliometrics Reference management Science software Qualitative data analysis Simulation Statistics
Philosophy portal
v t e

The humanities include the studies of foreign languages, history, philosophy, language arts (literature, writing, oratory, rhetoric, poetry, etc.), performing arts (theater, music, dance, etc.), and visual arts (painting, sculpture, photography, filmmaking, etc.).

Some definitions of the humanities include law and religion due to its shared similarities,[3] but these are not universally accepted because they are more so defined as being part of professional development education alongside some social sciences which can be split between the liberal arts and professional development, while all humanities fields are solely confined to traditional liberal arts education. Although anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, psychology, and sociology share some similarities with the humanities, these are widely considered social sciences in a similar way disciplines such as finance, business administration, political science, economics, and global studies have closer ties to the social sciences rather than the humanities.

Scholars in the humanities are called humanities scholars or sometimes humanists.[4] (The term humanist also describes the philosophical position of humanism, which antihumanist scholars in the humanities reject. Renaissance scholars and artists are also known as humanists.) Some secondary schools offer humanities classes usually consisting of literature, history, foreign language, and art.

Human disciplines like history and language mainly use the comparative method[5] and comparative research. Other methods used in the humanities include hermeneutics, source criticism, esthetic interpretation, and speculative reason.