The Battle of the Classics : How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today

by: Adler, E.

The Battle of the Classics
How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today
Eric Adler
Offers a justification of humanistic education that is decidedly different from those typically advanced by apologists today
Criticizes many contemporary defenses of the humanities, demonstrating that many works repeat the mistakes humanists made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Moves beyond the typical Great Books model to advance a globalized approach to the humanities that is intellectually and morally appropriate for the present

Description
These are troubling days for the humanities. In response, a recent proliferation of works defending the humanities has emerged. But, taken together, what are these works really saying, and how persuasive do they prove? The Battle of the Classics demonstrates the crucial downsides of contemporary apologetics for the humanities and presents in its place a historically informed case for a different approach to rescuing the humanistic disciplines in higher education. It reopens the passionate debates about the classics that took place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America as a springboard for crafting a novel foundation for the humanistic tradition.

Eric Adler demonstrates that current defenses of the humanities rely on the humanistic disciplines as inculcators of certain poorly defined skills such as "critical thinking." It criticizes this conventional approach, contending that humanists cannot hope to save their disciplines without arguing in favor of particular humanities content. As the uninspired defenses of the classical humanities in the late nineteenth century prove, instrumental apologetics are bound to fail. All the same, the book shows that proponents of the Great Books favor a curriculum that is too intellectually narrow for the twenty-first century. The Battle of the Classics thus lays out a substance-based approach to undergraduate education that will revive the humanities, even as it steers clear of overreliance on the Western canon. The book envisions a global humanities based on the examination of masterworks from manifold cultures as the heart of an intellectually and morally sound education.

Table of Contents
Introduction: The Sick Man of Higher Education
Chapter 1: Skills Are the New Canon
Chapter 2: From the Studia Humanitatis to the Modern Humanities
Chapter 3: A College Fetich?
Chapter 4: Darwin Meets the Curriculum
Chapter 5: Humanism vs. Humanitarianism
Chapter 6: Toward a Truly Ecumenical Wisdom

The Battle of the Classics : How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today

by: Adler, E.

• ISBN-13: 9780197518786 / 978-0-19-751878-6
• ISBN-03: 0197518788 / 0-19-751878-8
• Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2020