The more people know about the humanities,
the more they can understand about the world around them.
Why the world happens in a certain way, how do people relate to each other,
what sort of problems can be addressed through the common cultural currency
of the arts and music or literature.
Those are the things that help us
understand who we are as a people, who we are even as a nation.
How do we build the democracy that we are in the process of building?
How do we understand what social justice is?
One of the really wonderful things that humanities can bring to bear
is to make us understand that there were other paths
to get to where we are today.
It frees up the imagination to think about other possibilities.
Humanities research is really the inquiry into any realm of the human experience,
especially in literature, history, art, music, and philosophy.
Since 1982, the Stanford Humanities Center has been bringing together scholars and graduate students,
and even undergraduates to have wide ranging conversations about every aspect of the human experience.
We also support interdisciplinary research, and, in fact, research across the schools at Stanford.
What the Humanities Center does is it gives a center to the university.
Without it, I think we would be simply a conglomeration of many different voices
speaking in our own particular locales.
A lot of what I do as a philosopher is use my imagination,
think really hard, read and criticize other philosophers, but it takes a lot of time to think through these things.
That's the first gift of the humanities center, is it just gives you time.
The second gift that the humanities center gives is opportunities to build communities.
The 30 fellows who come to the Stanford Humanities Center every year come to do intensive research on their own various projects.
But, every day at lunch, they get together for casual, but also very serious conversations
about their research and about the place of their research in their own lives as human beings.
Lunch conversation is really highly valuable.
You get a lot of kind of sense of what's working, what isn't working.
We get to see how somebody who's a linguist or somebody who's an historian or somebody who's a philosopher might be thinking about things differently.
Fellows and other members of the Stanford community also participate in our roughly 15 workshops every year,
which are organized around a theme proposed by a group of faculty, such as capitalism or antiquity in the modern world.
Also every year the Stanford Humanities Center, in some form or fashion, stages about 50 events that are related to the humanities.
Many of those have an open invitation to the general public to attend and to participate in person.
The kinds of questions that we ask, as professors, are not that different from the kinds of questions that people out there in the world ask.
You know, who am I? Why am I here?
What does it mean that I believe this or that I think that?
We're today worried about very much the same kinds of problems that Aristotle was concerned with or Thucydides was concerned with or Hobbes was concerned with.
Just as a literary text, for example, ought to survive its present moment,
so too, the ideal piece of humanistic research ought to be something people can go back to.
Stanford and the Stanford Humanities Center are really at the forefront of digital humanities.
The lab model that we are providing here re-imagines the way that humanists
talk to each other by encouraging collaboration from the very earliest stages of the project.
When one pays attention to human culture, certain questions and problems rise to the fore
and one needs to draw from advanced understandings of those complications
to be able to deal with human culture as it manifests in medicine, in science, in politics.
I kind of think of the humanities as this very important fellow traveler with the sciences,
and the social sciences in making the world better.
Studying literature, reading literature, reading works of the past,
gives us kind of retrospective purchase on life, its most crucial conflicts and emotional tensions.
Yearnings, fears, it's all there.
I don't think we want to imagine a world without the humanities,
without the arts, without history, without literature, without someone able to tell the story.
It provides a window into human experience past and present.
And research into that helps clarify, outline, remember, those stories, that history.
It's critical to us going forward.