# Dead Disciplines **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 2, 2011, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692 "2011-11-02T23:44:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2011, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/1 "2011-11-02T23:44:31Z")
Or, Who Has a Good Philology Program? It’s said that, if nothing else, a Ph.D. program will always prepare you for a career teaching whatever you got a doctorate in; thus are programs self-perpetuating. However, this doesn’t always seem to work. Philology seems to be an example of something that is not discredited but simply deceased: Nobody disputes the fundamentals of the field but neither is anyone practicing them, except perhaps as part of a different field entirely. Classical philology especially, once the crown of the German universities that were the model of Western thought, seems to have fallen especially far. So, **excluding discredited nonsense like phrenology** , what other disciplines have dropped off the academic map? ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/2 "2011-11-03T00:20:33Z")
Not much of a response, but a few years back, a guy with a Ph.D in Medieval Islamic Architecture was bemoaning his (poor) job prospects. Why somebody would blow 4 years, and several hundred thousand $$ on something this arcane is beyond me. What about the “new” fields (with (insert blank) “studies”? E.G. “black studies”, “Wymen’s studies”, “Chicano studies”? These would be fertile fields to explore. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 12:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/3 "2011-11-03T00:45:05Z")
**ralph124c** : To have dropped off the map kind of implies you were on the map at one time. Nothing you mentioned quite qualifies, in my view, but I’m willing to be demonstrated wrong. ---
**Author:** ![ultrafilter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/3d9bf3/32.png) [@ultrafilter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ultrafilter)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/4 "2011-11-03T01:30:22Z")
They’re not entire disciplines, but as I understand it, projective geometry and point set topology are both pretty much dead as research areas. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/5 "2011-11-03T01:41:23Z")
I have a PhD in Folklore, a discipline which is barely hanging on, and yet it is a distinct field with a long history. And yes, I will work for food. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 1:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/6 "2011-11-03T01:43:39Z")
Has philology really died? I thought it had just been assimilated into the broader discipline of linguistics. You can still do something like, or something directly descended from, what philology used to be, but now it is carried on within a linguistics department rather than in a department of its own. Theology may not be quite dead yet, and I suppose it will not entirely disappear while some people still study to become clergy, but now it is a tiny field compared to academia as a whole, where once it was a huge, dominant discipline. Incidentally, I doubt that there ever were departments of _phrenology_, even back when it was given a lot of credence. It was never so much a field as a theory, or theoretical approach, in the area where the disciplines of physiology and psychiatry overlapped. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/7 "2011-11-03T02:19:11Z")
> [@ultrafilter](#): > > They’re not entire disciplines, but as I understand it, projective geometry and point set topology are both pretty much dead as research areas. I never would have guessed those. Fascinating. > [@Dr.Drake](#): > > I have a PhD in Folklore, a discipline which is barely hanging on, and yet it is a distinct field with a long history. And yes, I will work for food. Again, I never would have guessed this one. > [@njtt](#): > > Has philology really died? I thought it had just been assimilated into the broader discipline of linguistics. You can still do something like, or something directly descended from, what philology used to be, but now it is carried on within a linguistics department rather than in a department of its own. Well, yes, if a field used to be important its own right and has now been subsumed into a different field, it has mostly died compared to what it was. I think philology counts as ‘dead’ to the extent the British Empire does, at least. > [@](#): > > Theology may not be quite dead yet, and I suppose it will not entirely disappear while some people still study to become clergy, but now it is a tiny field compared to academia as a whole, where once it was a huge, dominant discipline. Indeed. Speaking of medieval education, rhetoric, which was fully one-third of the _trivium_, seems to have fallen a bit by the wayside; It’s part of communications and law programs, of course, so I guess it’s died as far as philology has died. > [@](#): > > Incidentally, I doubt that there ever were departments of _phrenology_, even back when it was given a lot of credence. It was never so much a field as a theory, or theoretical approach, in the area where the disciplines of physiology and psychiatry overlapped. Right. This makes a lot of sense as well. I mainly wanted to prevent a lot of people from posting to mention that and every other blind path science has rabbitted down. ---
**Author:** ![Saint\_Cad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saint_cad/32/18907_2.png) [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/8 "2011-11-03T03:48:18Z")
Humanics. At one time it had its own discipline color (crimson) in academic dress but was dropped in the 1930s and eventually journalism became represented by crimson. There are still a few degrees in it here and there but it is clearly not a discipline like it once was. ---
**Author:** ![UDS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecae2f/32.png) [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 4:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/9 "2011-11-03T04:14:20Z")
I think some of these examples involve a change of name, as much as or more than the disappearance of a discipline. The people who used to called philologists did what nowadays we would unhesitatingly identify as linguistics - probably as historical linguistics. Other fields were at best only established very shakily - did the idea of humanics as a distinct field of study, for example, ever have much traction outside the US? I think the whole point of a university is that pretty well anything may be the subject of study. Fashions about how we organise, classify and describe studies may change, as may fashions for studying particular topics. In fact, the former may be driven by the latter; as fewer peoples study a particular topic the academics involve may offer broader courses designed to attract more students, or their departments may be merged with others to make better use of resources, and this in turn may drive changes in nomenclature. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/10 "2011-11-03T05:14:33Z")
> [@Saint\_Cad](#): > > Humanics. At one time it had its own discipline color (crimson) in academic dress but was dropped in the 1930s and eventually journalism became represented by crimson. There are still a few degrees in it here and there but it is clearly not a discipline like it once was. You’ve out-obscured me. 😉 I’ve never heard of Humanics and neither has my spell checker. It sounds like a much better example than philology was. > [@UDS](#): > > I think some of these examples involve a change of name, as much as or more than the disappearance of a discipline. The people who used to called philologists did what nowadays we would unhesitatingly identify as linguistics - probably as historical linguistics. Right. This is a fair point. > [@](#): > > I think the whole point of a university is that pretty well anything may be the subject of study. Fashions about how we organise, classify and describe studies may change, as may fashions for studying particular topics. In fact, the former may be driven by the latter; as fewer peoples study a particular topic the academics involve may offer broader courses designed to attract more students, or their departments may be merged with others to make better use of resources, and this in turn may drive changes in nomenclature. All of this is very reasonable. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 12:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/11 "2011-11-03T12:58:34Z")
Is the field of “classics” still around? Knowing all about Roman customs should be a growth field. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 1:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/12 "2011-11-03T13:46:00Z")
**Derleth** , in Spain a large percentile of language teachers (second- or first-language), editors and translators have degrees in Philology. There are grades in Linguistics being offered now, but the first people whose diploma has _Lingüística_ on it haven’t left college yet; until now, it was _Filología_ all the way. Lists of required coursework for a new degree in Applied Linguistics (Romance Languages) and for an old one in Philology (Romance Language) from the same university (3 different ones) seem remarkaby similar. Sounds like it’s just a move from The Study of Language in Greek to The Study of Language in Latin. (Spain is in the middle of a complete upheaval of its university system) ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/13 "2011-11-03T17:04:12Z")
Once upon a time, I’d run into Professors of [Semiotics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics), and then run away as soon as I could. Came off as total BS artists. (I think there was a natural antipathy between us Computer Scientists and Semiotics folk.) I wouldn’t know even where to look for one now, if I was perversely inclined towards that. (Try reading the section on Semiotics of food in the above link.) ---
**Author:** ![Sattua](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sattua/32/11906_2.png) [@Sattua](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sattua)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/14 "2011-11-03T17:16:41Z")
Philology still exists, it’s just called “diachronic linguistics”. There are a few people who still study it. Once upon a time, frustrated with literary theory but wanting to study literature, I tried to create the field of “new philology”. Fortunately no one listened to me. Semiotics is indeed an irritatingly vague field, but it’s alive and well. I’ve been published in one of their journals and no, I still don’t understand what semiotics is 😛 ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/15 "2011-11-03T18:03:37Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > Indeed. Speaking of medieval education, rhetoric, which was fully one-third of the _trivium_, seems to have fallen a bit by the wayside; It’s part of communications and law programs, of course, so I guess it’s died as far as philology has died. The other two parts of the trivium were grammar and logic. They have died in the same sense that philology has. Grammar, like philology, has been absorbed into linguistics. Logic has been absorbed, mostly, into philosophy (where it is still a very active area of research, and to a less extent, into mathematics. > [@Saint\_Cad](#): > > Humanics. At one time it had its own discipline color (crimson) in academic dress but was dropped in the 1930s and eventually journalism became represented by crimson. There are still a few degrees in it here and there but it is clearly not a discipline like it once was. Count me as another who has never heard of Humanics (and I have taught ‘History of the Human Sciences’). Wikipedia does not know either, and Google seems to think that it is a fancy word for ergonomics (or possibly the [management of nonprofit organizations](http://www.humanics.org/), surely never a major academic discipline). Are you sure you do not mean Humanities (which is still alive and reasonably well)? If not, perhaps you can tell us what Humanics was, and where it was practiced. Thomas Kuhn somewhere mentions _geometrical optics_ as a dead discipline, in the sense that there is really nothing new to be discovered there. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/16 "2011-11-03T19:33:14Z")
> [@ultrafilter](#): > > They’re not entire disciplines, but as I understand it, projective geometry and point set topology are both pretty much dead as research areas. I beg to differ, but there is a whole journal (“Topology”) that publishes nothing but point-set topology. I have recently co-authored a paper in that subject. Not quite dead yet, but when I was in graduate school a lot of people more or less identified pure mathematics with theory of functions of a complex variable. Now at McGill it is taught as a one-term course every few years. I don’t know anyone working on projective geometry though. Since the classification of finite simple groups, that subject has pretty near died. Alchemy has died. As a serious subject, rather than a diversion, so has astrology. ---
**Author:** ![nikonikosuru](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/5f8ce5/32.png) [@nikonikosuru](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nikonikosuru)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/17 "2011-11-03T20:18:17Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > Is the field of “classics” still around? > Knowing all about Roman customs should be a growth field. Yep, my college had it. I remember they had to learn both some Greek and Latin but that’s all I remember from it…I remember working in the admissions office and when we’d hand out little pamphlets on the different majors, that one was rarely disturbed. I wonder what those who majored in Classics did after college. Probably the same thing as me. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/18 "2011-11-03T20:28:19Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > Alchemy has died. As a serious subject, rather than a diversion, so has astrology. As technologies they have died. As fields of research, alchemy morphed into chemistry (even the name did not change that much) and the research side of astrology always was, and remains as, astronomy. > [@nikonikosuru](#): > > I wonder what those who majored in Classics did after college. Probably the same thing as me. In Britain I think they still run the country, staffing the upper reaches of the Civil Service (at least, they did until fairly recent times). ---
**Author:** ![Busy\_Scissors](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/d78d45/32.png) [@Busy\_Scissors](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Busy_Scissors)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/19 "2011-11-03T21:09:28Z")
A discipline that’s really being squeezed as a brand, if not the actual research, is biochemistry - at least here in the UK. Less and less degrees being offered in it - the research is still important but it’s being subsumed into biology and chemistry schools (and degrees). On the same idea of branding research (which I realise is tangential to the OP) - some VCs have argued to set up universites in terms of the research problems that are being addressed. So you wouldn’t have separate disciplines like chemistry, physics, biology etc. You’d have a centre for research on energy, health, digital economy etc. And each of these centres would be multidisciplinary in terms of chemists, physicists, mathmaticians and so forth all being involved in the one building. Whilst this is perhaps a half-decent idea in terms of recognising that most research of major societal import tends to be multi-disciplinary, it tends to be unworkable in practice. You can’t teach under this model and scientists need collegiality with other scientists in the same discipline at least as much as they need inter-disciplinarity. That thought process has fragmented traditional disciplines though. At my last place there was no pharmacology or chemical engineering school - despite there being plenty of pharmacologists and chemical engineers. They had all being divided according to the research focus as that was though to be a better structure for raising funding. ---
**Author:** ![capybara](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/capybara/32/202_2.png) [@capybara](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/capybara)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2011, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692/20 "2011-11-03T22:54:15Z")
Classics, alive and hanging in there. Folklore: alive and hanging in there. Islamic medieval architecture, alive and growing (and awesome-- not obscure at al in my neck of the woods). Semiotics, alive and well in various language, linguistics, art history, etc programs. Rhetoric: alive and well in English, hist lit, art history, intellectual history fields. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-disciplines/601692.md?page=2)