Geesteswetenschappen

Franz Boas helps us solve the puzzle of where our emotional lives originate: in our selves or in the cultures around us

- by Noga Arikha

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This hand-painted stop motion animation recalls the textures of a family home demolished to make way for a widened road

- by Aeon Video

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Is mathematical beauty real? Or is it just a subjective, human ‘wow’ that is becoming redundant in an AI age?

- by Rita Ahmadi

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Neat ethical principles have nothing to say to doctors like me, faced with the brutal, bloody compromises of hospital life

- by Ronald W Dworkin

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A family swim, share meals and tell stories by a creek in Central Australia in a joyous celebration of much-needed rain

- by Aeon Video

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Gigacities Collective, magazine, English, 140 pages, 2025, Germany

This first issue of Elon magazine is almost a psychedelic trip – packed with Musk portraits and is extremely colourful. It overwhelms the reader with a redundant visual →

CD – Mind Travels Series

Sudden Fruit is a collaborative project in which Japanese pianist and composer Midori Hirano and sound architect Ivan Pavlov create, with surgical precision, an immersive and ghostly work that is suspended between acoustic and digital →

The superhuman qualities we attribute to machines have historically concerned tasks related to labour and efficiency. However, with A Needle in a Haystack, Varvara & Mar explore what happens when these qualities are used to implement metaphors in their work. →

cassette – Edições CN

You are alone on your bike, cutting through the wet asphalt beneath the neon glow of the surrounding billboards. Your map app crackles metallic commands in your earpiece, algorithms that decide your route through the urban →

Thames and Hudson Ltd / V&A, ISBN 978-0500480977, English, 208 pages, 2024, UK

In perfect timing with the major Tate exhibition Electric Dreams, the Victoria and Albert Museum has teamed up with Thames and Hudson →

Open letter urges Labor to reverse JRG scheme, introduced by Coalition in 2021, as cost of humanities degrees reaches more than $50,000

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Tim Winton knows what it’s like to be the first in a family to go to university – “what a breakthrough that is, the kind of opportunities it provides”.

It was at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, studying arts, that he wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer, launching a four-decade writing career.

The future of public knowledge rests on building open-access LLMs driven by ethics rather than profit, writes Prof Dr Matteo Valleriani

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly entered the landscape of historical research. Their capacity to process, annotate and generate texts is transforming scholarly workflows. Yet historians are uniquely positioned to ask a deeper question – who owns the tools that shape our understanding of the past?

Most powerful LLMs today are developed by private companies. While their investments are significant, their goals – focused on profit, platform growth or intellectual property control – rarely align with the values of historical scholarship: transparency, reproducibility, accessibility and cultural diversity.

Jim Endersby recalls how maths teachers responded to the arrival of cheap pocket calculators in the 1970s and likens it to current fears of AI use by university students

I agree with Prof Andrew Moran and Dr Ben Wilkinson (Letters, 2 March) that cheap and easy‐to‐use AI tools create problems for universities, but the reactions of many academics to these new developments remind me of the way some people responded to the arrival of cheap pocket calculators in the 1970s.

Reports of the imminent death of maths teaching in schools proved exaggerated. Maths teachers had to adapt, not least to teach students the longstanding rule “garbage in, garbage out”; if students had no idea of the fundamental principles and ideas behind maths, they would not realise their answer was meaningless. Today’s humanities teachers are going to have to adapt in similar ways.

Arts and humanities are being hit hardest by cuts in higher education, write Prof Thea Pitman and Prof Emma Cayley, and Dr Ronan McLaverty-Head and another letter writer comment on cuts at Cardiff and another Russell Group university

In response to the shocking news predicting up to 10,000 imminent job losses across the UK higher education sector (Quarter of leading UK universities cutting staff due to budget shortfalls, 1 February), we write to flag up a fact that the article largely misses: the degree to which arts and humanities subjects are bearing the brunt of these cuts.

While the article singles out the loss of nursing courses at Cardiff University and the closure of chemistry courses across the country, it mentions the humanities just once in passing. Last week it was ancient history, modern languages, music, religion and theology at Cardiff University. Not so long ago, it was subjects including English, history, music and theatre at Goldsmiths, and art history, music, philosophy and religious studies at the University of Kent, to name just two. And with each passing week more arts and humanities courses and departments are cut.

With degrees disappearing and reading rates plummeting, the arts face a critical moment in education and culture

The announcement that Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent is to stop offering English literature degrees has set several hares running, most of them in the wrong direction. The university said in effect that hardly anyone wanted to study English literature at degree level any more and the course was therefore no longer viable. If you can’t do EngLit in the city of Chaucer and Marlowe, where can you do it?

Canterbury’s tale is a familiar one. EngLit is in wholesale retreat at A level, with numbers down from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 in 2023, and there has been a decline at university, too, over the past decade, though statistics are disputed because the subject gets studied at degree level in many guises, including creative writing and linguistics. Overall, humanities subjects seem to be losing their appeal, with only 38% of students taking a course in 2021/22, down from nearly 60% between 2003/4 and 2015/16.