Whither the Humanities? (With Zena Hitz, Justin Smith-Ruiu, and D. Graham Burnett)

“What in God’s name are the humanities,” Lewis Lapham asked in a commencement address he delivered at St. John’s College in 2003, “and why are they of any use to us here in the bright blue, technological wonder of the twenty-first century?” His answer—the humanities are not luxuries akin to “the country club membership or the house in Palm Beach” but liberating necessities—harmonizes with the answers proposed by the three guests on this special, two-part episode of The World in Time, which commemorates the anniversary of the Quarterly’s revival. Today’s three guests are all scholars—“card-carrying, old-school metaphysical humanists”—who have dared to do what Lewis Lapham did nearly two decades ago: launch a nonprofit that brings the humanities and the arts into the American agora, the public square.  Zena Hitz, tutor at St. John’s College, is the founder of the Catherine Project, a nonprofit that, through online seminars and reading groups, makes the study of “the great books” available for free to all. She is joined by two returning guests: Justin Smith-Ruiu, professor of philosophy at the Université Paris Cité, editor of the Substack magazine The Hinternet, and founder of the Hinternet Foundation, which seeks to “steward humanism into a machine-driven future”; and D. Graham Burnett, Professor of the History of Science at Princeton University. A member of the Lapham’s Quarterly editorial board, Burnett is also the co-founder and director of the Strother School of Radical Attention, which offers to the general public courses and workshops that “deepen our shared understanding of attention’s relation to human flourishing.” In part two of today’s two-part episode, available for free and in full on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, Hohn and Hitz add a new conversation to our intermittent and ongoing series of conversations about Moby Dick and the history of the sea, discussing the “The Doubloon,” chapter 99 of Melville’s novel. Earlier conversations in our series about Moby Dick: Lewis Lapham’s Sea Stories, Wyatt Mason on “Extracts,” Francine Prose on “Loomings,” James Marcus on “The Mast-Head,” Charles Baxter on “The Sermon,” Elizabeth Kolbert on the History of Cetology, Alexander Chee on “The Counterpane,”Aaron Sachs on “The Monkey-Rope,” Caleb Crain on “Queequeg in his Coffin,” Philip Hoare on “Monstrous Pictures of Whales,” and Yiyun Li on “The Try-Works.”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.