The Role of the Humanities Past and Present: Future Perspectives Based on Ancient Ideas. Reflections by a Medievalist

Abstract

This study outlines how we might be able to explain and defend the supremely important role of the humanities, perhaps surprisingly, by resorting to medieval literature. While there are many good reasons even today, if not especially in the present, to promote the teaching of the humanities, many critics tend to undermine all cultural and historical investigations of the premodern world and subscribe to presentism. However, as medievalist perspectives can tell us, the very opposite is the case since both poets and philosophers from the past have preserved for us fundamental ideals and values, ethical concepts, and religious and cultural concepts about the interrelationshp between self and the world, between the material and the metaphysical dimension.