Students of the humanities confront two fundamental questions: How valid and rigorous is the type of knowledge attained in these disciplines? And what good is it? In The Humanities in the Age of Technology, Ciriaco Moron Arroyo offers a systematic inquiry into these questions and outlines the ongoing crisis of the humanities. He speaks to the low value society places on such disciplines as linguistics, literature, history, philosophy, and theology. His study is both historical and philosophical. The author begins with a definition of the humanities, and, since the social and the natural sciences have humanistic aspects, he pays attention to the border regions, especially to the humanistic import of the arts, cinema, and creative literature. The plural term ""disciplines"" points to the unifying nucleus of the interdisciplinary; the interdisciplinary is rooted in the human being as the focus from which all questions in the humanities and sciences emerge. Subsequent chapters are devoted to the phenomena of reading, understanding texts, and knowledge of reality. The final chapters are concerned with the usefulness of these disciplines in our society. The author argues that the humanities are the most useful disciplines, as they are the ""sciences"" that deal with human concerns such as personal identity, collective identity, communication, creativity, and the ultimate sense of life.
