“What are the Humanites?

” – worksheet #1/notes
(to be used with In-Class Presentations for Module 1)

1. Study/ies -- _________ (verb) on one phenomenon to the exclusion of other phenomena.

2. Systematic --Step-by-step (from simple to _________) using an academic _________ [a

procedure or group of procedures used in the past to __________ (verb) work on a particular
subject matter].

3. Meaning/s – This term makes this “In-class definition” a definition of College Humanities
or the study of the Humanities in “Higher Education.” The complexity of this term will be con-
sidered in detail in Module 2 as we concentrate attention on “a Theory of Human Cognition.”

4. Artifact/s -- (Etymology – rational arguments related to the _________ of words) from Latin
‘ars/artis’ – “beautiful thing/s” + ‘facere’ – “to _________ or _________ (verbs). Hence, arti-
facts are beautiful things that have been made. In Academic Humanities, students must con-
sider Aesthetics [a branch of _________ dedicated to rational arguments that answer the
complex (“second-order”) “What is beautiful?”] In Classical Academic Humanities classes
(such as this one) “beauty” is considered from the perspective of the artist. It is only more
modern “egalitarian” (seeking social equality) aesthetic arguments that maintain that “beauty
is in the eye of the _________.”

5. “Homo Faber” -- “homo sapiens” is a Latin designation used in classical Binomial

Taxonomy (rational arguments related to __________) to refer to human beings. In the view
of your professor, this designation is “culturally conditioned” and thus somewhat inadequate to
our purposes in this class. If we examine the “_________ _________” (2 words) of the origin-
ator of classical Binomial Taxonomy, __________ _________ (2 words) we will make an
argument for the inadequacy of “homo sapiens.”