How Insights from the Humanities Shaped the Twentieth Century

What have the humanities brought us during the last century? Once the pinnacle of intellectual fulfillment, today the humanities suffer from an image problem. Disciplines like philology, art history, linguistics and musicology are seen as a luxury pastime which is of little use to society and less to the economy. Arguments in favour of the humanities emphasize their importance for critical thinking, historical responsibility and for creating competent democratic citizens. While these arguments may all be true, humanities scholars seem to overlook the possibility that the very assumption behind the image problem is wrong. Many scholars stress that the humanities do not solve concrete problems and that their value lies elsewhere. Yet a closer look at the history of the humanities shows a rather different picture. In my talk I will focus on the comparative history of the humanities during the long twentieth century. I will show how ideas and concepts from linguistics have led to the development of high-level programming languages in computer science. I will argue that methods from philology were incorporated by biology to analyze DNA sequences. And I will describe how the method of historical source criticism found its way into other disciplines for critically evaluating sources: from forensic science to evidence-based medicine and jurisprudence.