Abstract
The main purpose of this article is to explain the humanities from the perspective of the supreme leader. The research method in this article is "descriptive - analytical". The words and terms of the leader are listed first and analyzed and then the necessary conclusions are drawn from it. The findings of this article are the discovery of the Supreme Leader's opinion about human sciences, and that his idea is different from western's idea in the foundation.
Introduction
The study of the humanities traced back to the ancient Greece, as the basis of a broad education for citizens. [1] According to that the humanities are defined as "academic disciplines that study human culture."[2] During Roman times, the humanities involved grammar, rhetoric and logic, along with arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. In the middle Ages, the humanities contrasted with dignity. Today, the humanities are more frequently contrasted with natural, physical and sometimes social sciences as well as professional trainings. [3]
In the Renaissance time, the fifteenth century, the humanities began to be regarded as subjects to study rather than practice, with a corresponding shift away from traditional fields into areas such as literature and history. In the 20th century, this view was in turn challenged by the postmodernist movement, which sought to redefine the humanities in more egalitarian terms suitable for a democratic society since the Greek and Roman societies in which the humanities originated were not at all democratic. [4]
There are several questions that should be answered according to the Supreme Leader's idea in this article: What are the human sciences? What is its subject? Why it is important? What are the foundations of human sciences? What are the characteristics of human-Islamic sciences? What are humanities functions and tasks? Of course, these questions may be answered in several sections. In this section one of them can be answered shortly from the perspective of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
What are the human sciences from the perspective of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei?
There are a lot of different definitions mentioned about the human science. Some of them will be pointed in this article briefly. Humanities are academic disciplines that study human culture. [5] The main point in this definition is "culture". Hence, humanities are a science that studies about a culture. What is the culture? Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.[6]
According to this definition, the humanities are sciences that study these subjects. In another definition “The humanities - including the study of languages, literature, history, jurisprudence, philosophy, comparative religion, ethics, and the arts - are disciplines of memory and imagination, telling us where we have been and helping us envision where we are going.”[7] Since the nineteenth century the humanities have generally been defined as the disciplines that investigate the expressions of the human mind. The expressions include language, music, art, literature, theatre, and poetry. Thus, philology, linguistics, musicology, art history, literary studies, and theatre studies all belong to the realm of the humanities.”[8]
What are the humanities from the perspective of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei? The leader didn't define the humanities directly, but we can get a definition for humanities from all his works, in the libraries or on the internet. In his idea humanities are sets of sciences such as Sociology, psychology, philosophy, economics, politics [9] history [10] and etc. that debate about the human dimensions. [11] One thing that is very important and we must pay attention to it is that the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei's definition and western's definitions for the humanities are not different in the words or terms. The only thing that distinguishes the two views is the foundations of the humanities such as Ontology, anthropology, epistemology, methodology and axiology. [12] He believes that when the worldviews become false, the humanities, that based on that, became false too, although the terms are similar.[13]
However, in the next part, it will be debated that since the foundations are different, so the humanities, based on them, are different too.
References:
[1] Bod, Rens; A New History of the Humanities, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014.
[2] Oxford English Dictionary 3rd Edition.
[3] Oxford English Dictionary 3rd Edition.
[4] Walling, Donovan R.; Under Construction: The Role of the Arts and Humanities in Postmodern Schooling Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, Bloomington, Indiana, 1997. Humanities come from human.
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities.
[6] https://www.tamu.edu/faculty/choudhury/culture.html.
[7] The Heart of the Matter (Report of the American Academy of Arts & Science’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences to the U. S. Congress in June 2013).
[8] Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford Univ. Press, 2013).
[9] Meeting with students and professors of Shiraz, 3 May 2008 (3/05/2008).
[10] Meet the young elite 16 September 2006 (16/09/2006).
[11] Meeting with students and professors of Shiraz, 3 May 2008 (3/05/2008).
[12] Meeting with a group of elite scientific.
[13] Meeting with a group of elite scientific