Whither the Humanities?

Syllabus | Hinternet Foundation Summer School, August, 2026

The deadline to apply for the Hinternet Foundation Summer School on the future of humanistic inquiry is JUNE 1. Apply now!

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General Information

This online summer school, led by Justin Smith-Ruiu, will explore the contemporary crisis of the humanities as part of a broader transformation in the technologies, institutions, and practices through which human beings preserve memory, cultivate freedom, and transmit tradition. We will examine both the historical emergence of the modern research university and the technological conditions now contributing to its transformation (and perhaps to its collapse). Throughout, participants will work collaboratively and experimentally, in a think-tank spirit, toward the development of new forms of humanistic inquiry and new educational models for the Hinternet Foundation itself.

This will be a reading-intensive course. Participants should expect substantial weekly reading and sustained discussion. The purpose of the course is not simply to analyze the crisis of the humanities from a distance, but to participate directly in shaping possible futures for humanistic education in a historically and theoretically informed way. In this respect, participants should think of themselves as collaborators and founding interlocutors in an ongoing institution-building project.

We strive to be neither technophobes nor -philes, but cautious and critical explorers. In this light, a central question running through the seminar will concern the role of new technologies in humanistic life. What would it take for our emerging technological tools to become instruments of humanistic cultivation rather than obstacles to it? Might large language models and other generative systems be approached as potentially productive partners in humanistic inquiry? Participants will be invited to keep a record of their own LLM usage in connection with the seminar, and to reflect critically on the promises such technologies may hold for new forms of inquiry, as well as on their limits, distortions, and risks.

Seminar Format

Each session will last two hours, 10:00-12:00 PST / 13:00-15:00 EST / 18:00-20:00 UK / 19:00-21:00 CET

From 0:00–0:50, the instructor, or an invited guest speaker, will present the session’s readings and attempt to tie them to the broader theoretical and programmatic aims of the course. This portion will be recorded and archived on the Hinternet Foundation website and on YouTube.

From 0:50–1:20, a participant volunteer will offer a response, commentary, or supplementary presentation. This portion may also be archived if the presenter wishes.

From 1:20–2:00, the session will open into general discussion and collaborative reflection. This portion will remain unrecorded.

Course Requirements

Attendance at all six sessions is expected. Beyond this, there are no formal requirements. Participants will be invited, though not required, to volunteer to give the scheduled presentations in response to the weekly materials. Participants will also be invited to submit final work related to the themes of the seminar. This work may take a straightforwardly scholarly, analytic, or explicative form, or it may involve a more creative and experimental dimension. Further details concerning final submissions and publication possibilities will be provided as the seminar approaches.

Participants who submit final work will receive feedback, and, where appropriate, may be invited to publish their work through The Hinternet.

There are no prerequisites for participation.

Thanks to generous funding received by the Hinternet Foundation, participation in the summer school is free of charge.

Please contact our Summer School Teaching Assistant and Course Coordinator Sophia Fiedler (sophia.fiedler@hinternetfoundation.org) with any questions.

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Provisional Program

Session 1 — The Challenge: Continuity in an Age of Technological Disruption

August 7

Readings

• Justin Smith-Ruiu, “A Third Way for the Humanities” (2026)

• Friends of Attention, Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (2026) (selections)

• Leif Weatherby, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (selections) (2025)

Leitmotifs

• Generative AI and the transformation of intellectual life

• The collapse of universitarian humanism; attention

• Memory and technological mediation

• Para-academic futures and new institution-building

Session 2 — Towards a New Division of the Sciences

August 8

Readings

• Petrarch, “On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others” (1367)

• Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958) (selections)

• Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (2010) (selections)

• Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (1798) (selections)

• William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (2005) (selections)

• Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas (1927—)

Leitmotifs

• The historical emergence of disciplinarity

• The classification and organization of knowledge in historical perspective

• Memory, method, and intellectual authority

Session 3 — Towards a New Art of Memory

August 14

Readings

• Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966) (selections)

• Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (1986) (selections)

• John Miles Foley, The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology (1988) (selections)

• Milman Parry, selections from the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature

• Justin Smith-Ruiu and Liubomira Romanova, Olonkho: Selected Translations of Sakha Oral Epic (forthcoming)

Leitmotifs

• Orality and literacy

• Literacy as technology

• Oral tradition as archive

• Alternatives to textual knowledge transmission

Session 4 — What About Nature?

August 15

Readings

• C. P. Snow, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” (1959)

• Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis (2004) (selections)

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790)

• Lorraine Daston, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment” (2003)

Leitmotifs

• The moral authority of nature

• Nature, wonder, and self-cultivation

• STEM — allies or aliens?

• Nature as object versus nature as interlocutor

Session 5 — What About Art?

August 21

Readings

• Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) (selections)

• Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (1991) (selections)

• Serge Gruzinski, What Time Is It There? America and Islam at the Dawn of Modern Times (2010) (selections)

• Kyrre Mirador, “A History of the Proceedings of ESTAR(SER)”, in In Search of the Third Bird (2021)

Leitmotifs

• Aesthetic education and freedom

• Philosophy as conceptual creation

• The place of creativity in the humanities

• Cultivating the historical imagination

Session 6 — What For? Humanism, Self-Cultivation, and Freedom

August 22

Readings

• Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (continued)

• Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises (1522-24)

• The Mīmāṁsā Sūtras (3rd century, BCE) (selections)

• Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (2002)

Leitmotifs

• Spiritual exercises and technologies of the self

• Self-cultivation as humanistic practice

• Freedom, discipline, and attention

• Humanism as a form of life

APPLY NOW! THE DEADLINE IS JUNE 1!

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