Chris Haufe's "Do the Humanities Create Knowledge?"

Chris Haufe is the Elizabeth M. and William C. Treuhaft Professor of the Humanities and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of How Knowledge Grows (2022) and Fruitfulness (2024).

Haufe applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Do the Humanities Create Knowledge?, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test passed with flying colors.

Page 99 features the beginning of the section “Essence and Exemplification,” which delivers the conceptual foundation on which the rest of the book’s claims ultimately rest. The point of this section is to resist the notion that the interminable debates that characterize much of the scholarly discourse in the humanities are either an indication that the humanities lack a sufficiently powerful investigate method to uncover the facts about which they are arguing, or (2) an indication that there are actually no facts with which these debates are concerned.

The real issue here is that scholars in the humanities are fundamentally focused on drawing out and articulating deep features of human experience, features that for most people lie beyond the realm of what they can describe, or even beyond awareness itself. There are things that we know but cannot articulate. One of the primary jobs of the humanities scholar is to develop articulations of ideas and presuppositions which are tacitly held but which nevertheless play a significant role in human life. By looking for patterns across exemplary instances of human achievement — classic works of art and literature, for example — we are able to grasp in a general way the essence of properties like elegance and beauty, as they were conceived of by the communities of scholars who studied those patterns.

Visit Chris Haufe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue