With more emphasis on scientific evidence in daily life as well as in academia, the discussion is raging whether the Humanities is a dying breed and it has submitted to Science. Are just reasonable arguments enough or arguments has to be supported by science? Following is excerpt from description of the book, Minding The Modern by Thomas Pfau   ( F. Sheikh) 

In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency—will, person, judgment, action—from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Coleridge, this study contends that humanistic concepts these writers seek to elucidate acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as we are prepared positively to engage (rather than historicize) their previous usages. Beginning with the rise of theological (and, eventually, secular) voluntarism, modern thought appears increasingly reluctant and, in time, unable to engage the deep history of its own underlying conceptions, thus leaving our understanding of the nature and function of humanistic inquiry increasingly frayed and incoherent. One consequence of this shift is to leave the moral self-expression of intellectual elites and ordinary citizens alike stunted, which in turn has fueled the widespread notion that moral and ethical concerns are but a special branch of inquiry largely determined by opinion rather than dialogical reasoning, judgment, and practice.

A clear sign of this regression is the present crisis in the study of the humanities, whose role is overwhelmingly conceived (and negatively appraised) in terms of scientific theories, methods, and objectives. The ultimate casualty of this reductionism has been the very idea of personhood and the disappearance of an adequate ethical language. Minding the Modern is not merely a chapter in the history of ideas; it is a thorough phenomenological and metaphysical study of the roots of today’s predicaments. 

Following are some excerpts from the Editorial in “ Point” on the subject of The New Humanities

“Sadly, the respect of present-day humanities scholars for “the way things have always been done” ranks just barely above their respect for the presidency of George W. Bush. There might have been a time when the humanities offered a counterweight within the university to the sciences’ relentless optimism and obsession with “progress,” but since at least the 1970s—perhaps not incidentally when the enrollment numbers began to decline—only the heretics have stood up for anything resembling tradition. Today’s humanities professors speak of nothing but “new research opportunities,” nothing but “progress,” nothing but the gross injustice of the “way things have always been done.”

Wieseltier and Pinker’s debate is thus academic in the pejorative sense. Wieseltier accuses Pinker of wanting the humanities to submit to the sciences; Pinker maintains that he simply wants the humanities to admit the relevance of scientific methods. Yet with a couple of exceptions (the Core at Columbia and the University of Chicago, the St. John’s colleges, that place out in the California desert where they herd cattle while debating Plato) the scholarly humanities have admitted much more than the relevance of the sciences: they have submitted; they have been subsumed. “Imagine,” writes Wieseltier,”

“This might seem a dire situation for the humanities; and it is, for the academic humanities. Fortunately, the humanities have always been bigger than the academic humanities. Unlike in the sciences, to participate in the conversation about what it means to be human does not require an advanced degree (increasingly it seems to be impeded by it)—which is why it should come as no surprise that the humanities are often more aggressively defended by magazine editors and op-ed columnists than by academics. In Wieseltier’s case, the argument for the sanctity of the academic humanities eventually tilts over into a call for what he calls the “old humanities,” examples of which (like Vendler’s recent piece on Dickinson) abound in the brilliant Books section over which he has stood guard since 1983. – “

http://thepointmag.com/2014/criticism/the-new-humanities