Simon During, in his piece “What Were the Humanities Anyway?”, places the field of the Humanities in the past tense in order to analyze and distill it down to its central components. In the name of this crusade, During lays out five different means of interpreting the school of thought, relaying each’s origins, basic principles and pitfalls. One such example (and my personal favorite as it is both the most generally and rationally applicable) is that of approaching the Humanities as a “set of dispositions”, whose goals are to uncover “truthfulness” to then be utilized to create a justified “interpretation”. However, as During finds no concrete answer to his search, he turns to the historical path the Humanities travelled, arriving at the conclusion that the discipline is a global, mutable and “archival” vessel.
