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Hi, my name is Thinkie, welcome to my blog! I'm a student in cultural studies, a museum enthusiast, a scrapbooker and an art journaler. I love to travel within Europe and I enjoy photography. You can read more about me on my homepage.
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Check out Cupcake's Flickr account! I enjoy:
Ali Edwards And in Dutch I enjoy:
Maarten Batenburg
I live, I love, I create, I capture, I learn, I enjoy.
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Homo SpecialisCultural studies cover a broad spectrum of topics, in the field of cultural history, literature, philosophy and art history. Oftentimes I feel like I'm only touching the surface of things that I would like to learn more about. Now off course, I'm only in the propaedeutic phase of my studies, so I'm sure that in time I'll get to dig a little deeper into some topics, but it's also inherent to the nature of cultural studies. It feels like these studies will not make me an expert in any field, but then again, this seems to be an excellent preparation for a MA in museum studies and the work in museums I hope I'll get to do (during and) afterwards.In antiquity and most of the Middle Ages, science (in the broader sense) was part of philosophy. Then, slowly, different sciences went their own way, developed their own methods. The amount of available knowledge was limited and it was possible for an intelligent man with opportunity to become an expert in many fields. Such men are called 'homo universalis', or, in English: renaissance man, even though the ideal for such an education (including many intellectual subjects but also athletics) went back on Plato's ideal upbringing 'paideia' and Aristotle's ideal of developing one's potential, especially intellectually. As research methods developed and the amount of knowledge in all fields grew, it became harder to specialize in several fields because doing so in one field takes many years of study. Yesterday I attended a lecture on the Nibelungenlied, an early 13th century epic poem. I realised there are people devoting their life-long studies to this poem. They don't just spend a while learning about it, they spent their whole career doing research on it, publishing on it, teaching about it. Interesting as something like this might be to me, that seems a little extreme. I'm wondering: how far can specialisation go? It gives a lot of satisfaction, I'm sure, to really be an expert on a certain topic and know all that can be known about it (and expand that amount of knowledge by research.) But you really have to have a passionate love for or interest in something to devote so much of your life to it. We seem to have gone from homo universalis to homo specialis.
Geplaatst op 05-09-2012. Jouw reactie |
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