To pick up on a few points: philology has been absorbed by fields which require results discovered in years past. Logic, including more esoteric branches like proof theory, modal logic, etc., is now part of any philosophy student’s repertoire. Hermeneutics, midrash, and so forth, similar.
Rhetoric, on the other hand, is rarely exercised formally in any part of any discipline, except for perhaps those who read Quintilian in their spare time; most classics scholars would eagerly decry the lapsus of interest (ETA a lapsus from the perspective of a classics scholar), but IME most people in letters, perhaps even in philosophy, take the time and trouble to learn at least Latin and Attic Gk. ETA not philosophy grad students IME – many of them don’t even know enough French or German to even begin to decipher (rough example) manuscripts from Husserl (in his shorthand, which needs German, but is peculiar in the extreme) or much work in logic, mathematics, and ontology written on the continent in general.
Really? I get the opposite impression in the U.S. It is known as a hard major but very much in demand and fairly popular among the driven types that want to make it into medical school. There is a lot of activity in pure biochemistry academic work as well. I started out as a psychology major and ended up being pushed into neuroscience because that is where the action was at and then found myself working in a biochem lab because that is where much of the action was at within neuroscience. Industry certainly needs biochem people as well so I would call that one thriving at least in the U.S.
I know that botany isn’t dead but you don’t see too many pure botanists around anymore and many universities, even many large research institutions, don’t offer degrees in botany.
Humanics was considerered enough of a discipline as to have been given its own academic color by the IBAC (the official repository of the academic dress rules in the US) officially in 1932 but unofficially back as far as 1918. By 1959, humanics was gone. Some schools offer certificates in humanics run by American Humanics and I believe a few schools offer degrees in philanthropy which is not quite the same as humanics. Whereas philanthropy tends to focus on action affecting the welfare of all people, humanics is more of the philosophy of human interaction in service to each other.
Projective space and projective varieties are some of the most fundamental objects of study of algebraic geometry. This is a very active area of research in mathematics today.
Saint Cad, could you explain what humanics is more clearly? Doing a little Googling, it appears to me that it’s mostly used to refer to the study of leadership and management for nonprofit organizations. Apparently it’s also sometimes used as a synonym for “ergonomics.” A few websites claim that it’s “the study of human nature,” whatever that means. It appear that the field disappeared because no one could even decide what it was about.
Part of the reason humanics disappeared as a discipline probably was because it was so nebulous. First of all, it is not leadership of non-profits - that is public administration and there are many MPA programs out there. As best as I can figure out, humanics is the study of what it takes to become a complete person with a philanthropic undertone, but think philanthropy as unconditional regard for fellow human beings and not some endowment from a rich person. The best definition I found is
For what it’s worth, my alma mater still maintains a department that offers a curriculum of physical-training-and-leadership-exercises-plus-history-coursework, which remains the academic discipline of choice for students who agreed to spend years in service upon graduation.
Of course, the professors call it “Military Science.”
This was the first thing I thought of. The field was never a huge one, but it has really contracted. It’s a little shocking to me that the (ostensibly) best folklore program in the US (Indiana University) has not one scholar specializing in European folklore of any variety.
Hell yeah. If, say, medieval Gothic architecture isn’t considered an unimaginably obscure field, I can’t imagine why medieval Islamic architecture would be. There are probably more medieval mosques still in existence than medieval churches, after all.
Moral: There is no such thing as a discipline too arcane to produce interesting and important research, if the discipline in question studies something that is technically complex and/or historically widespread. There are certainly disciplines too arcane to provide a reliable abundance of career prospects, but that’s not the same thing.
Are you suggesting that the mathematics of quasiperiodic tiling is, in some objective or quasi-objective sense, somehow less obscure or esoteric than the study of medieval Islamic architecture? :dubious:
Regarding Jaledin’s description of the study of rhetoric - seldom formally practiced, but “alive and well” in other disciplines - I, as a recent MA in a rhetoric-based English program, would concur. My formal rhetorical study was limited to one intensive seminar, but that was almost mindbendingly interdisciplinary - reading philosophers, linguists, logicians, critical/cultural theorists, from Francis Bacon right through to the postmodernists. (Another such seminar covered Quintilian to Bacon; only one was required.)
Most of the curriculum in RPC (rhetoric and professional communication) ranged widely in that same way. I studied business and technical writing, communication and learning theory, information and data design, all over a loose but recurring framework of rhetorical goals and methods.* Logos, ethos, mythos, pathos* were never too remote, even as we studied the tools of other trades more intensely.
