Humanities at the crossroads

The Chicago critics, a group of academics that gathered around Ronald S. Crane in the early 1930s, tackled questions that are still relevant today: What is more important — humanistic general education or vocational specialisation? How should a university define its function in the context of an industrial, technological and pluralistic democratic society? What kind of knowledge can the humanities contribute to the development of the individual and to society as a whole? While the Chicago critics’ conceptual apparatus is modelled on Aristotle’s Poetics, it is significant that their formal literary analysis appears within the context of a defence of the humanities as (humanistic) disciplines or the (liberal) arts which aim at ethical as well as aesthetic education, thus forming value standards that help individuals to find orientation.