Question Should philosophy be considered among the group of disciplines we consider sciences or among the humanities? I understand that the answer to this is typically taken to be that philosophy is among the humanities but I also know that philosophers sometimes resist this categorisation. Obviously we'd need to refine our definitions of these categories first to see if we can produce a useful answer. And perhaps the answer is that there's a third category that philosophy should belong to all on its own?

Accepted:
August 25, 2011

Comments

It's funny you asked, as I have just been discussing with the Physics faculty at my university the possibility of having my course in Metaphysics count as an elective in their program. One might ask, I think, why there are categories at all. Why not just have disciplinary programs. The reason is often more administrative than pedagogical or theoretical. Universities need means of distributing budgets, committee assignments, and review procedures. Sure there is a background in the medieval division of the ancient liberal arts into two categories: the verbal studies of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic) and the quantitative studies of the quadrivium (music, astronomy, arithmetic, and geometry). And there's a stream of division that extends out of nineteenth-century ideas about the human sciences. But I find very little theoretical consideration given to the division today. My hope, in fact, is that it will diminish somewhat in importance as interdisciplinary studies gain in prominence. And that's what I'd say about philosophy. It's trans-disciplinary, even meta-disciplinary, and itself not a single method or practice but a family of them. So, I think philosophy is properly located in both the sciences and humanities. Topics like logic, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science, are properly taught and researched among the sciences. Others like, philosophy of language, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, and literary criticism are properly taught and researched among the humanities. Many, like courses in the history of philosophy, philosophical anthropology, and social political philosophy, are properly taught and researched in both.