This theme section brings together introductions to some of the seminal texts by African authors ... more This theme section brings together introductions to some of the seminal texts by African authors that have shaped the African humanities from at least the twelfth century throughout Africa and until today. The section starts from the admittedly somewhat contentious idea that Africa should be treated as a historical unity. We note that this is itself a context-specific way of regarding the continent and do not negate the incredible diversity hidden behind the name. Rather, we mirror earlier themes published in this journal in recognizing that “Africa” could mean different things in the history of the humanities, based on a variety of demarcations and divisions. We do so because this is in line with historical practices of collecting classics within the African humanities. We do not intend for the collection to be exhaustive but rather offer an incentive to engage with the history of the African humanities. In assembling these essays, we hope to offer some concrete examples of African scholarship within the humanities in an effort to move beyond purely theoretical debates on the existence of an African canon.
Special Issue on the Classics of the Humanities in Africa (History of Humanities), 2024
Our special issue on the Classics of the Humanities in Africa has been published in History of Hu... more Our special issue on the Classics of the Humanities in Africa has been published in History of Humanities 9.2. It contains introductions to foundational texts from the 11th to the 21st century. With Larissa Schulte Nordholt and Naomi Nkealah as guest editors. See https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/hoh/2024/9/2
While the history of the humanities is rapidly expanding as a new field of study, questions about... more While the history of the humanities is rapidly expanding as a new field of study, questions about diversity and inclusiveness of the field have rarely been addressed. An examination of the papers presented at the Making of the Humanities conferences and the articles published in the History of Humanities journal shows that the field is far from diverse. In this essay I argue that pursuing greater diversity is fruitful for the field because it helps to avoid gaps and biases, it can uncover interactions and influences across regions, it debunks myths in the history of the humanities, and it allows for finding global trends that are left unnoticed otherwise. I will offer three suggestions-for researchers, teachers, and the Society-on how we can turn the history of the humanities into a more diverse and inclusive field. While I will mostly focus on cultural and geographical diversity, I will come back to gender diversity at the end of this essay.
Statistical parsers are e ective but are typically limited to producing projective dependencies o... more Statistical parsers are e ective but are typically limited to producing projective dependencies or constituents. On the other hand, linguisti- cally rich parsers recognize non-local relations and analyze both form and function phenomena but rely on extensive manual grammar development. We combine advantages of the two by building a statistical parser that produces richer analyses. We investigate new techniques to implement treebank-based parsers that allow for discontinuous constituents. We present two systems. One system is based on a string-rewriting Linear Context-Free Rewriting System (LCFRS), while using a Probabilistic Discontinuous Tree Substitution Grammar (PDTSG) to improve disambiguation performance. Another system encodes the discontinuities in the labels of phrase structure trees, allowing for efficient context-free grammar parsing.The two systems demonstrate that tree fragments as used in tree-substitution grammar improve disambiguation performance while capturing non-l...
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, 2014
The representations and processes yielding the limited length and telegraphic style of language p... more The representations and processes yielding the limited length and telegraphic style of language production early on in acquisition have received little attention in acquisitional modeling. In this paper, we present a model, starting with minimal linguistic representations, that incrementally builds up an inventory of increasingly long and abstract grammatical representations (form+meaning pairings), in line with the usage-based conception of language acquisition. We explore its performance on a comprehension and a generation task, showing that, over time, the model better understands the processed utterances, generates longer utterances, and better expresses the situation these utterances intend to refer to.
In this paper, we present a novel approach to clustering and classification of music. The approac... more In this paper, we present a novel approach to clustering and classification of music. The approach is based on the concept of interval categories, which is a theoretical, but perceptually motivated construct that groups sets of pitch events into six different categories each of which has its own musical character. A piece of music can be represented by six percentages that express the occurrences of each category in the piece. This piece of music can, in this way, be represented as one point in a six dimensional space. We choose the three most significant dimensions to visualize music from different composers and genres. We will see that, using this approach, automatic classification between tonal and atonal music is possible. Furthermore, we will present a successful visual clustering of 1) the three periods of Beethoven, 2) the genres Rock and Jazz, and 3) several composers through various musical time periods.
It has been observed that tonal spaces can be mapped onto a two-dimensional lattice Z 2 (1). It h... more It has been observed that tonal spaces can be mapped onto a two-dimensional lattice Z 2 (1). It has also been shown that various musical items, such as the major and minor diatonic scales, form convex1 subsets in this space (1, 4 ). This triggers the question whether convexity is a more widespread concept in music. The current paper systematically
Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics - ACL '01, 2001
We aim at finding the minimal set of fragments which achieves maximal parse accuracy in Data Orie... more We aim at finding the minimal set of fragments which achieves maximal parse accuracy in Data Oriented Parsing. Experiments with the Penn Wall Street Journal treebank show that counts of almost arbitrary fragments within parse trees are important, leading to improved parse accuracy over previous models tested on this treebank (a precision of 90.8% and a recall of 90.6%). We isolate some dependency relations which previous models neglect but which contribute to higher parse accuracy.
In this paper we present three design principles of language – experience, heterogeneity and redu... more In this paper we present three design principles of language – experience, heterogeneity and redundancy – and present recent developments in a family of models incorporating them, namely Data-Oriented Parsing/Unsupervised Data-Oriented Parsing. Although the idea of some form of redundant storage has become part and parcel of parsing technologies and usage-based linguistic approaches alike, the question how much of it is cognitively realistic and/or computationally optimally efficient is an open one. We argue that a segmentation-based approach (Bayesian Model Merging) combined with an all-subtrees approach reduces the number of rules needed to achieve an optimal performance, thus making the parser more efficient. At the same time, starting from unsegmented wholes comes closer to the acquisitional situation of a language learner, and thus adds to the cognitive plausibility of the model.
We argue that van der Velde's & de Kamps's model does not solve the binding problem but m... more We argue that van der Velde's & de Kamps's model does not solve the binding problem but merely shifts the burden of constructing appropriate neural representations of sentence structure to unexplained preprocessing of the linguistic input. As a consequence, their model is not able to explain how various neural representations can be assigned to sentences that are structurally ambiguous.
Musical scales have both general and culture-specific properties. While most common scales use oc... more Musical scales have both general and culture-specific properties. While most common scales use octave equivalence and discrete pitch relationships, there seem to be no other universal properties. This paper presents an additional property across the world's musical scales that may qualify for universality. When the intervals of 998 (just intonation) scales from the Scala Archive are represented on an Euler lattice, 96.7% of them form star-convex structures. For the subset of traditional scales this percentage is even 100%. We present an attempted explanation for the star-convexity feature, suggesting that the mathematical search for universal musical properties has not yet reached its limits.
Historians of science have described various cases of disciplines influencing one another. Such e... more Historians of science have described various cases of disciplines influencing one another. Such exchanges across disciplinary boundaries often signal innovation, intellectual change, and breakthroughs. A satisfactory framework from which the historical phenomenon of epistemic transfer between disciplines can be studied systematically, however, has not yet been proposed. This essay intro-Rens Bod is Professor of Digital Humanities and History of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. He is Codirector of Amsterdam's Vossius Center for the History of Humanities and Sciences. His most recent book is A World of Patterns: The History of Knowledge (Amsterdam, 2019) (in Dutch).
List of Figures 419 Index 421 manism to historicism, Bos focuses on two humanist historians (Mach... more List of Figures 419 Index 421 manism to historicism, Bos focuses on two humanist historians (Machiavelli and Guicciardini) and two nineteenth-century historians (Ranke and Droysen). His starting point is Machiavelli's and Guicciardini's painful experience that the old world of Italian city-states was lost. A similar dissociation of the past occurred Break or continuity in the humanities? Various papers in this volume suggest that the notion of a revolution in the humanities around 1800 is more problematic than has been previously assumed. While the nineteenth century brought discipline formation and specialized methodologies, several concepts and ideas were in existence already well before 1800 and were consolidated among scholars, for instance in philology, linguistics, musicology and historiography (Leerssen, Semi, Van Hal). New in the nineteenth century was especially the academic institutionalization of disciplines (Elffers, Paul, Jørgensen), not so much the nature of humanistic knowledge as a whole. Universities guaranteed stability and continuity, but these also existed among Notes The first conference in this series was 'The Making of the Humanities: First International Conference on the History of the Humanities', which took place from - October at the University of Amsterdam. The second conference was 'The Making of the Humanities II: Second International Conference on the History of the Humanities' , which took place from - October also at the
The idea that the world can be understood through patterns and the principles that govern them is one of the most important human insights—it may also be our greatest survival strategy. Our search for patterns and principles began 40,000 years ago, when striped patterns were engraved on mammoths' bones to keep track of the moon's phases. What routes did human knowledge take to grow from these humble beginnings through many detours and dead ends into modern understandings of nature and culture? In this work of unprecedented scope, Rens Bod removes the Western natural sciences from their often-central role to bring us the first global history of human knowledge. Having sketched the history of the humanities in his ground-breaking A New History of the Humanities, Bod now adopts a broader perspective, stepping beyond classical antiquity back to the Stone Age to answer the question: Where did our knowledge of the world today begin and how did it develop? Drawing on developments from all five continents of the inhabited world, World of Patterns offers startling connections. Focusing on a dozen fields—ranging from astronomy, philology, medicine, law, and mathematics to history, botany, and musicology—Bod examines to what degree their progressions can be considered interwoven and to what degree we can speak of global trends.In this pioneering work, Bod aims to fulfill what he sees as the historian's responsibility: to grant access to history's goldmine of ideas. Bod discusses how inoculation was invented in China rather than Europe; how many of the fundamental aspects of modern mathematics and astronomy were first discovered by the Indian Kerala school; and how the study of law provided fundamental models for astronomy and linguistics from Roman to Ottoman times. The book flies across continents and eras. The result is an enlightening symphony, a stirring chorus of human inquisitiveness extending through the ages.
In this commentary, we focus on the linking problem Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven identify. Instead ... more In this commentary, we focus on the linking problem Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven identify. Instead of taking a stance on the issue of universal grammar itself, we adopt an epistemological and methodological perspective on language acquisition research. We argue that the problem, linking the input to preexisting representations, constitutes just a small part of a larger methodological problem, namely how to link the input a learner receives, through a set of learning mechanisms and possibly innate representations, to the behavior the learner is producing, whether in spontaneous production or in laboratory experiments. Currently, none of the existing proposals provide an evaluated, or even a testable, account of the full process, that is, an input-output model of linguistic ontogeny. Although the focus on phenomena in isolation, probably an effect of the prevalence of the experimental method, allows the researcher some degree of control, it also distracts from the understanding of how the different mechanisms behave and interact. Our proposed solution is a more holistic approach to the problem in which the learning mechanisms and their interaction are made fully explicit, and in which the predicted behavior of the learner is (more) globally evaluated. Computational modeling provides exactly the tools appropriate for this task, thereby furthering more precise and testable theories of the learning mechanisms involved.*
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2012
It is generally assumed that hierarchical phrase structure plays a central role in human language... more It is generally assumed that hierarchical phrase structure plays a central role in human language. However, considerations of simplicity and evolutionary continuity suggest that hierarchical structure should not be invoked too hastily. Indeed, recent neurophysiological, behavioural and computational studies show that sequential sentence structure has considerable explanatory power and that hierarchical processing is often not involved. In this paper, we review evidence from the recent literature supporting the hypothesis that sequential structure may be fundamental to the comprehension, production and acquisition of human language. Moreover, we provide a preliminary sketch outlining a non-hierarchical model of language use and discuss its implications and testable predictions. If linguistic phenomena can be explained by sequential rather than hierarchical structure, this will have considerable impact in a wide range of fields, such as linguistics, ethology, cognitive neuroscience, p...
This theme section brings together introductions to some of the seminal texts by African authors ... more This theme section brings together introductions to some of the seminal texts by African authors that have shaped the African humanities from at least the twelfth century throughout Africa and until today. The section starts from the admittedly somewhat contentious idea that Africa should be treated as a historical unity. We note that this is itself a context-specific way of regarding the continent and do not negate the incredible diversity hidden behind the name. Rather, we mirror earlier themes published in this journal in recognizing that “Africa” could mean different things in the history of the humanities, based on a variety of demarcations and divisions. We do so because this is in line with historical practices of collecting classics within the African humanities. We do not intend for the collection to be exhaustive but rather offer an incentive to engage with the history of the African humanities. In assembling these essays, we hope to offer some concrete examples of African scholarship within the humanities in an effort to move beyond purely theoretical debates on the existence of an African canon.
Special Issue on the Classics of the Humanities in Africa (History of Humanities), 2024
Our special issue on the Classics of the Humanities in Africa has been published in History of Hu... more Our special issue on the Classics of the Humanities in Africa has been published in History of Humanities 9.2. It contains introductions to foundational texts from the 11th to the 21st century. With Larissa Schulte Nordholt and Naomi Nkealah as guest editors. See https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/hoh/2024/9/2
While the history of the humanities is rapidly expanding as a new field of study, questions about... more While the history of the humanities is rapidly expanding as a new field of study, questions about diversity and inclusiveness of the field have rarely been addressed. An examination of the papers presented at the Making of the Humanities conferences and the articles published in the History of Humanities journal shows that the field is far from diverse. In this essay I argue that pursuing greater diversity is fruitful for the field because it helps to avoid gaps and biases, it can uncover interactions and influences across regions, it debunks myths in the history of the humanities, and it allows for finding global trends that are left unnoticed otherwise. I will offer three suggestions-for researchers, teachers, and the Society-on how we can turn the history of the humanities into a more diverse and inclusive field. While I will mostly focus on cultural and geographical diversity, I will come back to gender diversity at the end of this essay.
Statistical parsers are e ective but are typically limited to producing projective dependencies o... more Statistical parsers are e ective but are typically limited to producing projective dependencies or constituents. On the other hand, linguisti- cally rich parsers recognize non-local relations and analyze both form and function phenomena but rely on extensive manual grammar development. We combine advantages of the two by building a statistical parser that produces richer analyses. We investigate new techniques to implement treebank-based parsers that allow for discontinuous constituents. We present two systems. One system is based on a string-rewriting Linear Context-Free Rewriting System (LCFRS), while using a Probabilistic Discontinuous Tree Substitution Grammar (PDTSG) to improve disambiguation performance. Another system encodes the discontinuities in the labels of phrase structure trees, allowing for efficient context-free grammar parsing.The two systems demonstrate that tree fragments as used in tree-substitution grammar improve disambiguation performance while capturing non-l...
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, 2014
The representations and processes yielding the limited length and telegraphic style of language p... more The representations and processes yielding the limited length and telegraphic style of language production early on in acquisition have received little attention in acquisitional modeling. In this paper, we present a model, starting with minimal linguistic representations, that incrementally builds up an inventory of increasingly long and abstract grammatical representations (form+meaning pairings), in line with the usage-based conception of language acquisition. We explore its performance on a comprehension and a generation task, showing that, over time, the model better understands the processed utterances, generates longer utterances, and better expresses the situation these utterances intend to refer to.
In this paper, we present a novel approach to clustering and classification of music. The approac... more In this paper, we present a novel approach to clustering and classification of music. The approach is based on the concept of interval categories, which is a theoretical, but perceptually motivated construct that groups sets of pitch events into six different categories each of which has its own musical character. A piece of music can be represented by six percentages that express the occurrences of each category in the piece. This piece of music can, in this way, be represented as one point in a six dimensional space. We choose the three most significant dimensions to visualize music from different composers and genres. We will see that, using this approach, automatic classification between tonal and atonal music is possible. Furthermore, we will present a successful visual clustering of 1) the three periods of Beethoven, 2) the genres Rock and Jazz, and 3) several composers through various musical time periods.
It has been observed that tonal spaces can be mapped onto a two-dimensional lattice Z 2 (1). It h... more It has been observed that tonal spaces can be mapped onto a two-dimensional lattice Z 2 (1). It has also been shown that various musical items, such as the major and minor diatonic scales, form convex1 subsets in this space (1, 4 ). This triggers the question whether convexity is a more widespread concept in music. The current paper systematically
Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics - ACL '01, 2001
We aim at finding the minimal set of fragments which achieves maximal parse accuracy in Data Orie... more We aim at finding the minimal set of fragments which achieves maximal parse accuracy in Data Oriented Parsing. Experiments with the Penn Wall Street Journal treebank show that counts of almost arbitrary fragments within parse trees are important, leading to improved parse accuracy over previous models tested on this treebank (a precision of 90.8% and a recall of 90.6%). We isolate some dependency relations which previous models neglect but which contribute to higher parse accuracy.
In this paper we present three design principles of language – experience, heterogeneity and redu... more In this paper we present three design principles of language – experience, heterogeneity and redundancy – and present recent developments in a family of models incorporating them, namely Data-Oriented Parsing/Unsupervised Data-Oriented Parsing. Although the idea of some form of redundant storage has become part and parcel of parsing technologies and usage-based linguistic approaches alike, the question how much of it is cognitively realistic and/or computationally optimally efficient is an open one. We argue that a segmentation-based approach (Bayesian Model Merging) combined with an all-subtrees approach reduces the number of rules needed to achieve an optimal performance, thus making the parser more efficient. At the same time, starting from unsegmented wholes comes closer to the acquisitional situation of a language learner, and thus adds to the cognitive plausibility of the model.
We argue that van der Velde's & de Kamps's model does not solve the binding problem but m... more We argue that van der Velde's & de Kamps's model does not solve the binding problem but merely shifts the burden of constructing appropriate neural representations of sentence structure to unexplained preprocessing of the linguistic input. As a consequence, their model is not able to explain how various neural representations can be assigned to sentences that are structurally ambiguous.
Musical scales have both general and culture-specific properties. While most common scales use oc... more Musical scales have both general and culture-specific properties. While most common scales use octave equivalence and discrete pitch relationships, there seem to be no other universal properties. This paper presents an additional property across the world's musical scales that may qualify for universality. When the intervals of 998 (just intonation) scales from the Scala Archive are represented on an Euler lattice, 96.7% of them form star-convex structures. For the subset of traditional scales this percentage is even 100%. We present an attempted explanation for the star-convexity feature, suggesting that the mathematical search for universal musical properties has not yet reached its limits.
Historians of science have described various cases of disciplines influencing one another. Such e... more Historians of science have described various cases of disciplines influencing one another. Such exchanges across disciplinary boundaries often signal innovation, intellectual change, and breakthroughs. A satisfactory framework from which the historical phenomenon of epistemic transfer between disciplines can be studied systematically, however, has not yet been proposed. This essay intro-Rens Bod is Professor of Digital Humanities and History of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. He is Codirector of Amsterdam's Vossius Center for the History of Humanities and Sciences. His most recent book is A World of Patterns: The History of Knowledge (Amsterdam, 2019) (in Dutch).
List of Figures 419 Index 421 manism to historicism, Bos focuses on two humanist historians (Mach... more List of Figures 419 Index 421 manism to historicism, Bos focuses on two humanist historians (Machiavelli and Guicciardini) and two nineteenth-century historians (Ranke and Droysen). His starting point is Machiavelli's and Guicciardini's painful experience that the old world of Italian city-states was lost. A similar dissociation of the past occurred Break or continuity in the humanities? Various papers in this volume suggest that the notion of a revolution in the humanities around 1800 is more problematic than has been previously assumed. While the nineteenth century brought discipline formation and specialized methodologies, several concepts and ideas were in existence already well before 1800 and were consolidated among scholars, for instance in philology, linguistics, musicology and historiography (Leerssen, Semi, Van Hal). New in the nineteenth century was especially the academic institutionalization of disciplines (Elffers, Paul, Jørgensen), not so much the nature of humanistic knowledge as a whole. Universities guaranteed stability and continuity, but these also existed among Notes The first conference in this series was 'The Making of the Humanities: First International Conference on the History of the Humanities', which took place from - October at the University of Amsterdam. The second conference was 'The Making of the Humanities II: Second International Conference on the History of the Humanities' , which took place from - October also at the
The idea that the world can be understood through patterns and the principles that govern them is one of the most important human insights—it may also be our greatest survival strategy. Our search for patterns and principles began 40,000 years ago, when striped patterns were engraved on mammoths' bones to keep track of the moon's phases. What routes did human knowledge take to grow from these humble beginnings through many detours and dead ends into modern understandings of nature and culture? In this work of unprecedented scope, Rens Bod removes the Western natural sciences from their often-central role to bring us the first global history of human knowledge. Having sketched the history of the humanities in his ground-breaking A New History of the Humanities, Bod now adopts a broader perspective, stepping beyond classical antiquity back to the Stone Age to answer the question: Where did our knowledge of the world today begin and how did it develop? Drawing on developments from all five continents of the inhabited world, World of Patterns offers startling connections. Focusing on a dozen fields—ranging from astronomy, philology, medicine, law, and mathematics to history, botany, and musicology—Bod examines to what degree their progressions can be considered interwoven and to what degree we can speak of global trends.In this pioneering work, Bod aims to fulfill what he sees as the historian's responsibility: to grant access to history's goldmine of ideas. Bod discusses how inoculation was invented in China rather than Europe; how many of the fundamental aspects of modern mathematics and astronomy were first discovered by the Indian Kerala school; and how the study of law provided fundamental models for astronomy and linguistics from Roman to Ottoman times. The book flies across continents and eras. The result is an enlightening symphony, a stirring chorus of human inquisitiveness extending through the ages.
In this commentary, we focus on the linking problem Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven identify. Instead ... more In this commentary, we focus on the linking problem Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven identify. Instead of taking a stance on the issue of universal grammar itself, we adopt an epistemological and methodological perspective on language acquisition research. We argue that the problem, linking the input to preexisting representations, constitutes just a small part of a larger methodological problem, namely how to link the input a learner receives, through a set of learning mechanisms and possibly innate representations, to the behavior the learner is producing, whether in spontaneous production or in laboratory experiments. Currently, none of the existing proposals provide an evaluated, or even a testable, account of the full process, that is, an input-output model of linguistic ontogeny. Although the focus on phenomena in isolation, probably an effect of the prevalence of the experimental method, allows the researcher some degree of control, it also distracts from the understanding of how the different mechanisms behave and interact. Our proposed solution is a more holistic approach to the problem in which the learning mechanisms and their interaction are made fully explicit, and in which the predicted behavior of the learner is (more) globally evaluated. Computational modeling provides exactly the tools appropriate for this task, thereby furthering more precise and testable theories of the learning mechanisms involved.*
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2012
It is generally assumed that hierarchical phrase structure plays a central role in human language... more It is generally assumed that hierarchical phrase structure plays a central role in human language. However, considerations of simplicity and evolutionary continuity suggest that hierarchical structure should not be invoked too hastily. Indeed, recent neurophysiological, behavioural and computational studies show that sequential sentence structure has considerable explanatory power and that hierarchical processing is often not involved. In this paper, we review evidence from the recent literature supporting the hypothesis that sequential structure may be fundamental to the comprehension, production and acquisition of human language. Moreover, we provide a preliminary sketch outlining a non-hierarchical model of language use and discuss its implications and testable predictions. If linguistic phenomena can be explained by sequential rather than hierarchical structure, this will have considerable impact in a wide range of fields, such as linguistics, ethology, cognitive neuroscience, p...
While the meaning of life may forever remain a mystery, we can find out what is meaning-making in... more While the meaning of life may forever remain a mystery, we can find out what is meaning-making in life. Namely by examining how individuals in various historical periods and cultures have attributed purpose and meaning to their existence. Thus we can empirically explore the question "What is the search for meaning?" but not the question "What is the meaning of life?".4 Yet the latter question dominated thinking about meaning and purpose for centuries, probably because so many people yearned for an answer. As a result, the question we can actually answer - what is meaning-making? - was often pushed aside.
Yet this very question is so fascinating. How can we get inspired by the many ways in which people in the past and present have attributed purpose and meaning to their lives? We will refer to these ways as forms of meaning-making. The common opinion is that "mankind has differed for thousands of years on the question of what the meaning of life is," and that "everyone searches in their own way for meaning and purpose in life."5 These statements seem so obvious that I have long thought myself too that research into forms of meaning-making is not worthwhile. Only in recent years have I noticed that the statements rely on unsupported and untested assumptions that are far from self-evident.
The idea that the world can be understood through patterns and the principles that govern them is one of the most important human insights—it may also be our greatest survival strategy. Our search for patterns and principles began 40,000 years ago, when striped patterns were engraved on mammoths' bones to keep track of the moon's phases. What routes did human knowledge take to grow from these humble beginnings through many detours and dead ends into modern understandings of nature and culture? In this work of unprecedented scope, Rens Bod removes the Western natural sciences from their often-central role to bring us the first global history of human knowledge. Having sketched the history of the humanities in his ground-breaking A New History of the Humanities, Bod now adopts a broader perspective, stepping beyond classical antiquity back to the Stone Age to answer the question: Where did our knowledge of the world today begin and how did it develop? Drawing on developments from all five continents of the inhabited world, World of Patterns offers startling connections. Focusing on a dozen fields—ranging from astronomy, philology, medicine, law, and mathematics to history, botany, and musicology—Bod examines to what degree their progressions can be considered interwoven and to what degree we can speak of global trends.In this pioneering work, Bod aims to fulfill what he sees as the historian's responsibility: to grant access to history's goldmine of ideas. Bod discusses how inoculation was invented in China rather than Europe; how many of the fundamental aspects of modern mathematics and astronomy were first discovered by the Indian Kerala school; and how the study of law provided fundamental models for astronomy and linguistics from Roman to Ottoman times. The book flies across continents and eras. The result is an enlightening symphony, a stirring chorus of human inquisitiveness extending through the ages.
Een andere universiteit is noodzakelijk en mogelijk.
Hoogleraren Rens Bod, Remco Breuker en In... more Een andere universiteit is noodzakelijk en mogelijk.
Hoogleraren Rens Bod, Remco Breuker en Ingrid Robeyns spijkeren met dit pamflet veertig stellingen aan de poort van de universiteit. Het moet anders.
De universiteit verkeert in een ernstige crisis. Er is een grote toestroom van studenten, onderwijs en onderzoek worden uiteengetrokken, er is al bijna twintig jaar te weinig geld om aan haar maatschappelijke opdracht te voldoen en er is sprake van een extreme hiërarchie. Gevolgen zijn een ongezond hoge werkdruk, steeds minder onderzoekstijd, aanhoudende sociale onveiligheid en een democratisch tekort. De politiek pleegt roofbouw op de wetenschappers en voert een verdeel-en-heersstrategie door een fictief onderscheid te maken tussen enerzijds de ‘zachte’ sociale en geesteswetenschappen, en anderzijds de ‘harde’ technische en bètawetenschappen. De universiteitsbestuurders blijken niet in staat het tij te keren.
In dit pamflet doen drie toonaangevende wetenschappers aan de hand van veertig provocerende stellingen voorstellen om de universiteit weer te herstellen tot een prachtige institutie die cruciaal is voor een welvarende, democratische en toekomstgerichte samenleving. Zij laten zien dat een andere universiteit niet alleen noodzakelijk, maar ook mogelijk is. De auteurs zijn allen actief binnen bewegingen om de universiteit te vernieuwen en hebben achtergronden in zowel de alfa-, bèta- als gammawetenschappen.
"There is a preconception so deeply rooted in our culture that even scholars seem to believe it. ... more "There is a preconception so deeply rooted in our culture that even scholars seem to believe it. This is the assumption that whatever the humanities do, they do not solve concrete problems let alone result in societal applications. Yet a quick glance at the general history of the humanities shows otherwise: contrary to common wisdom, insights and methods from the humanities solved concrete problems and resulted in applications that had a profound impact."
The idea that the world can be understood through patterns and the principles that govern them is... more The idea that the world can be understood through patterns and the principles that govern them is one of the most important human insights and may be our greatest survival strategy. Our search for patterns and principles, and the systematic knowledge they form, began at least 40,000 years ago when striped patterns were engraved on mammoth’s bones. Since then, which roads has human knowledge wandered to develop into today’s understanding of nature and culture? Which detours and dead ends? In a work of unprecedented scope, this book removes the Western natural sciences from their often-central role to present the first global history of human knowledge. Having sketched the history of the humanities in A New History of the Humanities (2014), Rens Bod now adopts a broader perspective, stepping beyond classical antiquity, in which our notions of patterns and principles were already partly crystallised, back to the Stone Age in order to answer the question: where did our knowledge of the world today begin and how did it develop? The book’s approach is poly-centric and multi-disciplinary, drawing on developments in all five corners of the inhabited world. Focusing on ten disciplines, and discussing another ten disciplines next to these, the book examines to what degree their developments and protagonists can be considered interwoven with one another and to what degree we can speak of global trends.
Many histories of science have been written, but A New History of the Humanities offers the first... more Many histories of science have been written, but A New History of the Humanities offers the first overarching history of the humanities from Antiquity to the present. There are already historical studies of musicology, logic, art history, linguistics, and historiography, but this volume gathers these, and many other humanities disciplines, into a single coherent account.
Its central theme is the way in which scholars throughout the ages and in virtually all civilizations have sought to identify patterns in texts, art, music, languages, literature, and the past. What rules can we apply if we wish to determine whether a tale about the past is trustworthy? By what criteria are we to distinguish consonant from dissonant musical intervals? What rules jointly describe all possible grammatical sentences in a language? How can modern digital methods enhance pattern-seeking in the humanities? Rens Bod contends that the hallowed opposition between the sciences (mathematical, experimental, dominated by universal laws) and the humanities (allegedly concerned with unique events and hermeneutic methods) is a mistake born of a myopic failure to appreciate the pattern-seeking that lies at the heart of this inquiry. A New History of the Humanities amounts to a persuasive plea to give Panini, Valla, Bopp, and countless other often overlooked intellectual giants their rightful place next to the likes of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.
While histories within the context of a single humanities discipline have been written for more t... more While histories within the context of a single humanities discipline have been written for more than a century, it is only over the last decade that we have witnessed histories that go beyond single humanities disciplines and that bring together different fields, periods or regions. It thus comes as a surprise that virtually no studies go into the methodological problems of the new métier. Questions abound: What do we mean by “bringing together” different humanities fields across time and space? Should we study their shared concepts, methods, virtues, research practices, historical actors, pedagogical practices, personal interactions, or yet something else? And when in history can we speak of the “humanities” as a group of disciplines? And how can we compare the humanities from different parts of the world? In this essay, I will discuss four methodological challenges which I believe to be constitutive for the history of the humanities as a field. These are the challenges of demarcation, anachronism, eurocentrism and incommensurability. Any history of the humanities that goes beyond the scope of a single discipline, period or region will have to address at least one of these challenges. While none of my challenges have absolute solutions, I will give a motivated choice for each of them. I will argue that my solutions provide a viable way to write a comparative history of the humanities, and that we can therefore speak of them as maxims. Although the preferred solutions will differ among historians, the challenges remain the same. At the end of my essay, I will discuss other possible solutions to the challenges, as well as other possible challenges for the history of the humanities, such as the challenge of forgotten scholars, non-academic humanities and colonial humanities. Finally, I will go into the relation between the history of the humanities and the history of science and knowledge.
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The idea that the world can be understood through patterns and the principles that govern them is one of the most important human insights—it may also be our greatest survival strategy. Our search for patterns and principles began 40,000 years ago, when striped patterns were engraved on mammoths' bones to keep track of the moon's phases. What routes did human knowledge take to grow from these humble beginnings through many detours and dead ends into modern understandings of nature and culture? In this work of unprecedented scope, Rens Bod removes the Western natural sciences from their often-central role to bring us the first global history of human knowledge. Having sketched the history of the humanities in his ground-breaking A New History of the Humanities, Bod now adopts a broader perspective, stepping beyond classical antiquity back to the Stone Age to answer the question: Where did our knowledge of the world today begin and how did it develop? Drawing on developments from all five continents of the inhabited world, World of Patterns offers startling connections. Focusing on a dozen fields—ranging from astronomy, philology, medicine, law, and mathematics to history, botany, and musicology—Bod examines to what degree their progressions can be considered interwoven and to what degree we can speak of global trends.In this pioneering work, Bod aims to fulfill what he sees as the historian's responsibility: to grant access to history's goldmine of ideas. Bod discusses how inoculation was invented in China rather than Europe; how many of the fundamental aspects of modern mathematics and astronomy were first discovered by the Indian Kerala school; and how the study of law provided fundamental models for astronomy and linguistics from Roman to Ottoman times. The book flies across continents and eras. The result is an enlightening symphony, a stirring chorus of human inquisitiveness extending through the ages.
The idea that the world can be understood through patterns and the principles that govern them is one of the most important human insights—it may also be our greatest survival strategy. Our search for patterns and principles began 40,000 years ago, when striped patterns were engraved on mammoths' bones to keep track of the moon's phases. What routes did human knowledge take to grow from these humble beginnings through many detours and dead ends into modern understandings of nature and culture? In this work of unprecedented scope, Rens Bod removes the Western natural sciences from their often-central role to bring us the first global history of human knowledge. Having sketched the history of the humanities in his ground-breaking A New History of the Humanities, Bod now adopts a broader perspective, stepping beyond classical antiquity back to the Stone Age to answer the question: Where did our knowledge of the world today begin and how did it develop? Drawing on developments from all five continents of the inhabited world, World of Patterns offers startling connections. Focusing on a dozen fields—ranging from astronomy, philology, medicine, law, and mathematics to history, botany, and musicology—Bod examines to what degree their progressions can be considered interwoven and to what degree we can speak of global trends.In this pioneering work, Bod aims to fulfill what he sees as the historian's responsibility: to grant access to history's goldmine of ideas. Bod discusses how inoculation was invented in China rather than Europe; how many of the fundamental aspects of modern mathematics and astronomy were first discovered by the Indian Kerala school; and how the study of law provided fundamental models for astronomy and linguistics from Roman to Ottoman times. The book flies across continents and eras. The result is an enlightening symphony, a stirring chorus of human inquisitiveness extending through the ages.
Yet this very question is so fascinating. How can we get inspired by the many ways in which people in the past and present have attributed purpose and meaning to their lives? We will refer to these ways as forms of meaning-making. The common opinion is that "mankind has differed for thousands of years on the question of what the meaning of life is," and that "everyone searches in their own way for meaning and purpose in life."5 These statements seem so obvious that I have long thought myself too that research into forms of meaning-making is not worthwhile. Only in recent years have I noticed that the statements rely on unsupported and untested assumptions that are far from self-evident.
The idea that the world can be understood through patterns and the principles that govern them is one of the most important human insights—it may also be our greatest survival strategy. Our search for patterns and principles began 40,000 years ago, when striped patterns were engraved on mammoths' bones to keep track of the moon's phases. What routes did human knowledge take to grow from these humble beginnings through many detours and dead ends into modern understandings of nature and culture? In this work of unprecedented scope, Rens Bod removes the Western natural sciences from their often-central role to bring us the first global history of human knowledge. Having sketched the history of the humanities in his ground-breaking A New History of the Humanities, Bod now adopts a broader perspective, stepping beyond classical antiquity back to the Stone Age to answer the question: Where did our knowledge of the world today begin and how did it develop? Drawing on developments from all five continents of the inhabited world, World of Patterns offers startling connections. Focusing on a dozen fields—ranging from astronomy, philology, medicine, law, and mathematics to history, botany, and musicology—Bod examines to what degree their progressions can be considered interwoven and to what degree we can speak of global trends.In this pioneering work, Bod aims to fulfill what he sees as the historian's responsibility: to grant access to history's goldmine of ideas. Bod discusses how inoculation was invented in China rather than Europe; how many of the fundamental aspects of modern mathematics and astronomy were first discovered by the Indian Kerala school; and how the study of law provided fundamental models for astronomy and linguistics from Roman to Ottoman times. The book flies across continents and eras. The result is an enlightening symphony, a stirring chorus of human inquisitiveness extending through the ages.
Hoogleraren Rens Bod, Remco Breuker en Ingrid Robeyns spijkeren met dit pamflet veertig stellingen aan de poort van de universiteit. Het moet anders.
De universiteit verkeert in een ernstige crisis. Er is een grote toestroom van studenten, onderwijs en onderzoek worden uiteengetrokken, er is al bijna twintig jaar te weinig geld om aan haar maatschappelijke opdracht te voldoen en er is sprake van een extreme hiërarchie. Gevolgen zijn een ongezond hoge werkdruk, steeds minder onderzoekstijd, aanhoudende sociale onveiligheid en een democratisch tekort. De politiek pleegt roofbouw op de wetenschappers en voert een verdeel-en-heersstrategie door een fictief onderscheid te maken tussen enerzijds de ‘zachte’ sociale en geesteswetenschappen, en anderzijds de ‘harde’ technische en bètawetenschappen. De universiteitsbestuurders blijken niet in staat het tij te keren.
In dit pamflet doen drie toonaangevende wetenschappers aan de hand van veertig provocerende stellingen voorstellen om de universiteit weer te herstellen tot een prachtige institutie die cruciaal is voor een welvarende, democratische en toekomstgerichte samenleving. Zij laten zien dat een andere universiteit niet alleen noodzakelijk, maar ook mogelijk is. De auteurs zijn allen actief binnen bewegingen om de universiteit te vernieuwen en hebben achtergronden in zowel de alfa-, bèta- als gammawetenschappen.
In a work of unprecedented scope, this book removes the Western natural sciences from their often-central role to present the first global history of human knowledge. Having sketched the history of the humanities in A New History of the Humanities (2014), Rens Bod now adopts a broader perspective, stepping beyond classical antiquity, in which our notions of patterns and principles were already partly crystallised, back to the Stone Age in order to answer the question: where did our knowledge of the world today begin and how did it develop? The book’s approach is poly-centric and multi-disciplinary, drawing on developments in all five corners of the inhabited world. Focusing on ten disciplines, and discussing another ten disciplines next to these, the book examines to what degree their developments and protagonists can be considered interwoven with one another and to what degree we can speak of global trends.
Its central theme is the way in which scholars throughout the ages and in virtually all civilizations have sought to identify patterns in texts, art, music, languages, literature, and the past. What rules can we apply if we wish to determine whether a tale about the past is trustworthy? By what criteria are we to distinguish consonant from dissonant musical intervals? What rules jointly describe all possible grammatical sentences in a language? How can modern digital methods enhance pattern-seeking in the humanities? Rens Bod contends that the hallowed opposition between the sciences (mathematical, experimental, dominated by universal laws) and the humanities (allegedly concerned with unique events and hermeneutic methods) is a mistake born of a myopic failure to appreciate the pattern-seeking that lies at the heart of this inquiry. A New History of the Humanities amounts to a persuasive plea to give Panini, Valla, Bopp, and countless other often overlooked intellectual giants their rightful place next to the likes of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.
In this essay, I will discuss four methodological challenges which I believe to be constitutive for the history of the humanities as a field. These are the challenges of demarcation, anachronism, eurocentrism and incommensurability. Any history of the humanities that goes beyond the scope of a single discipline, period or region will have to address at least one of these challenges. While none of my challenges have absolute solutions, I will give a motivated choice for each of them. I will argue that my solutions provide a viable way to write a comparative history of the humanities, and that we can therefore speak of them as maxims. Although the preferred solutions will differ among historians, the challenges remain the same. At the end of my essay, I will discuss other possible solutions to the challenges, as well as other possible challenges for the history of the humanities, such as the challenge of forgotten scholars, non-academic humanities and colonial humanities. Finally, I will go into the relation between the history of the humanities and the history of science and knowledge.