about.

Many of you may have walked blindly into this course without knowing what it is about. You hear humanities and your mind may immediately race to such divergent things as the Humane Society and Human Anatomy. While I appreciate the connotative undertones of the word “humanity,” we must (as in so many other things) look to our Latin root. Humanitas is best understood to mean “human nature” or “humanity.” 

The study of humanities (literae humaniores) is, therefore the study of what makes us human. This leads to a much larger question, which is, of course, what is it that exactly makes us human? Once again, we need to look at denotative and connotative meanings of “human.” Denotatively, we most often consider “human” in the noun form, meaning that a “human” is in the genus homo. Connotatively, we need to consider “human” differently, to consider it as a characteristic that defines who we are. So, exactly how do we define ourselves?