humanities

hu·man·i·ty

H0318800 (hyo͞o-măn′ĭ-tē)n. pl. hu·man·i·ties 1. Humans considered as a group; the human race.2. The condition or quality of being human.3. The quality of being humane; benevolence.4. A humane characteristic, attribute, or act.5. humanitiesa. The languages and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome; the classics.b. Those branches of knowledge, such as philosophy, literature, and art, that are concerned with human thought and culture.

[Middle English humanite, from Old French, from Latin hūmānitās, from hūmānus, human; see human.]

Thesaurus

Noun

humanities - studies intended to provide general knowledge and intellectual skills (rather than occupational or professional skills); "the college of arts and sciences"arts, humanistic discipline, liberal artsdiscipline, field of study, subject area, subject field, bailiwick, subject, field, study - a branch of knowledge; "in what discipline is his doctorate?"; "teachers should be well trained in their subject"; "anthropology is the study of human beings"neoclassicism - revival of a classical style (in art or literature or architecture or music) but from a new perspective or with a new motivationclassicalism, classicism - a movement in literature and art during the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe that favored rationality and restraint and strict forms; "classicism often derived its models from the ancient Greeks and Romans"Romantic Movement, Romanticism - a movement in literature and art during the late 18th and early 19th centuries that celebrated nature rather than civilization; "Romanticism valued imagination and emotion over rationality"English - the discipline that studies the English language and literaturehistory - the discipline that records and interprets past events involving human beings; "he teaches Medieval history"; "history takes the long view"art history - the academic discipline that studies the development of painting and sculpturechronology - the determination of the actual temporal sequence of past eventsbeaux arts, fine arts - the study and creation of visual works of artperforming arts - arts or skills that require public performanceOccidentalism - the scholarly knowledge of western cultures and languages and peopleOriental Studies, Orientalism - the scholarly knowledge of Asian cultures and languages and peoplephilosophy - the rational investigation of questions about existence and knowledge and ethicsliterary study - the humanistic study of literaturelibrary science - the study of the principles and practices of library administrationphilology, linguistics - the humanistic study of language and literaturemusicology - the scholarly and scientific study of musicSinology - the study of Chinese history and language and culturestemmatics, stemmatology - the humanistic discipline that attempts to reconstruct the transmission of a text (especially a text in manuscript form) on the basis of relations between the various surviving manuscripts (sometimes using cladistic analysis); "stemmatology also plays an important role in musicology"; "transcription errors are of decisive importance in stemmatics"trivium - (Middle Ages) an introductory curriculum at a medieval university involving grammar and logic and rhetoric; considered to be a triple way to eloquencequadrivium - (Middle Ages) a higher division of the curriculum in a medieval university involving arithmetic and music and geometry and astronomy

Translations

sciences humaineswetenschap

Humanities

the entire complex of disciplines in the social sciences, such as philosophy, history, philology, law, economics, and art studies, as well as the work habits and skills connected with them. Education in the humanities is the most important means of forming a person’s world view and plays an enormous role in the overall development of individuals and in their intellectual, moral, ideological, and political training. In the socialist countries the ideological and methodological foundation of education in the humanities is Marxism-Leninism.

A distinction is made between general and professional education in the humanities. The general secondary school gives general training in the humanities. The humanities are studied along with the natural sciences and consist of study in one’s native language, foreign languages, literature, history, social studies, and various fields of art. In the USSR subjects in the area of the humanities are also taught in the professional-technical and secondary specialized schools, regardless of the particular type of school. Students in higher educational institutions also receive training in the humanities at a higher level, again regardless of the field of specialization they have chosen. This training in the humanities is part of their education in the social sciences (which in the USSR include philosophy, political economy, scientific communism, and the history of the CPSU) and in certain other socioeconomic disciplines, such as the fundamentals of state law. Students’ knowledge in the humanities is extended and deepened by elective subjects organized at general educational schools, professional and technical schools, technicums, and institutions of higher learning. Examples of such courses in Soviet higher educational institutions are fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics and scientific atheism.

In the USSR the increased general knowledge in the humanities among the workers and the satisfaction of the workers’ needs in the social sciences are promoted by universities of Marxism-Leninism, people’s universities, and other cultural and educational institutions.

Specialized training in the humanities, in philosophical, historical, philological, economic, juridical, and pedagogical sciences, as well as in art studies and in various other fields of art and culture, are provided mainly by the universities and industrial branch educational establishments; specialists receive this training in specialized secondary schools.

The broad development of education in the humanities in the USSR is one of the measures taken to raise the cultural and educational level of the people further, as envisaged by the Program of the CPSU.

With the advance of scientific and technical progress, the methodology of the natural and technical sciences (such as cybernetics and the construction of mathematical models) penetrates more and more into the humanities. The advance of technology and of the natural sciences, in turn, requires that specialists have an ever more profound methodological training and knowledge of the social sciences. Because of these trends the division of education into the humanities, the natural sciences, and technical education has to some extent become only a conventional designation.

A. N. GORSHENEV and V. G. PANOV

humanities

Related to humanities: Social sciences

noun

Synonyms for humanities

noun studies intended to provide general knowledge and intellectual skills (rather than occupational or professional skills)

Synonyms

arts
humanistic discipline
liberal arts

Related Words

discipline
field of study
subject area
subject field
bailiwick
subject
field
study
neoclassicism
classicalism
classicism
Romantic Movement
Romanticism
English
history
art history
chronology
beaux arts
fine arts
performing arts
Occidentalism
Oriental Studies
Orientalism
philosophy
literary study
library science
philology
linguistics
musicology
Sinology
stemmatics
stemmatology
trivium
quadrivium