Philosophy of the Humanities

Co-authored by three philosophers, this ground-breaking book explores a range of new and classic questions concerning the humanities. For example, do the humanities (like the sciences) really make progress? Is there anything that unifies scholarship in the humanities, across fields as diverse as history, literary studies, philosophy, and musicology? And what should we make of the political aims of the humanities--for example, the desire by many scholars in the humanities to uncover systems of oppression and domination? Does this interfere with "objective" scholarship or not?

In many ways this book is the first of its kind, considering new topics such as the value of replication studies in the humanities, and deference to other humanities scholars. A Philosophy of the Humanities offers new ways of thinking about the nature of the humanities and the distinctive contributions they make to human understanding.

Stephen R. Grimm is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Fordham University in New York. He is Series Editor for the Oxford University Press series "Guides to the Good Life," and author of Varieties of Understanding (2019) and Making Sense of the World (2017). He is a Lifetime Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University.

Rik Peels is University Research Chair in Analytic and Interdisciplinary Philosophy of Religion at the Department of Beliefs and Practices and the Philosophy Department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is also a Senior Research Associate at the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science at the University of Johannesburg in South-Africa. He is the author of numerous books, including Ignorance (2023), and Responsible Belief (2016). He currently leads an ERC-funded project on Extreme Beliefs: The Epistemology and Ethics of Fundamentalism.

René van Woudenberg is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Professor at CLUE+, the Interfaculty Research Institute for Culture, Cognition, History, and Hertiage at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Common-Sense Philosophy (2020), and Scientism: Prospects and Problems (2018).