Dublin, Ireland

Professional Doctoral Programme – FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Table of contents

Professional Doctoral Programme – FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES at DCU

Language: English Studies in English
Subject area: humanities
University website: www.dcu.ie/

Definitions and quotes

Humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the time. Today, the humanities are more frequently contrasted with natural, and sometimes social, sciences as well as professional training.
Professional
A professional is a member of a profession or any person who earns their living from a specified professional activity. The term also describes the standards of education and training that prepare members of the profession with the particular knowledge and skills necessary to perform their specific role within that profession. In addition, most professionals are subject to strict codes of conduct, enshrining rigorous ethical and moral obligations. Professional standards of practice and ethics for a particular field are typically agreed upon and maintained through widely recognized professional associations, such as the IEEE. Some definitions of "professional" limit this term to those professions that serve some important aspect of public interest and the general good of society.
Social
Living organisms including humans are social when they live collectively in interacting populations, whether they are aware of it, and whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.
Professional
Scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it.
Walter Benjamin, "The Life of Students" (1915), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings – vol. 1: 1913-1926 (Harvard University Press: 1996), p. 38
Humanities
Social science and humanities … have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. … The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 357
Humanities
What do you believe was on the mind of the ancient Romans that they called the arts of speaking humanity? They judged that, indisputably, by the study of these disciplines not only was the tongue refined, but also the wildness and barbarity of people’s minds was amended.
Philip Melanchthon, Praise of Eloquence (1523), p. 66
Scientists across Europe are harnessing the power of electrokinetic transport to remove contaminating chemicals from the environment.
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