{"id":12131,"date":"2025-08-07T16:17:01","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T16:17:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/humanities\/?p=12131"},"modified":"2026-04-08T20:25:52","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T20:25:52","slug":"the-knowledge-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/humanities\/the-knowledge-business\/","title":{"rendered":"The &#8220;Knowledge Business&#8221;?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>Vincent Colapietro, Philosophy Department<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Watch a recording of the talk on our <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/D8SIQJmC8JQ?si=atUPnZn8Z1K-SCQl\">YouTube<\/a> channel.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Humanists have failed, according to many humanists (e.g., Louis Menand), to offer a persuasive case for their disciplines making a substantive or simply significant contribution to \u201cthe knowledge business\u201d (<em>New Yorker<\/em>). What could be a more damming failure of the defenders of the humanities than what is manifestly a <em>rhetorical<\/em> failure? To praise themselves for being able to teach argumentative and communicative skills and, then, to fail to make this very case seems singularly damning. What significant contribution <em>do<\/em> disciplines such as history, literature, and classics make to the \u201cknowledge industry\u201d? What indispensable \u201ctools\u201d are acquired or at least highly refined by taking courses in the humanities? Dr. Colapietro&#8217;s thesis is that these disciplines, <em>tout ensemble<\/em>, offer an integrative and critical approach to any field whatsoever: it is the combination of the synoptic and critical functions which most dramatically distinguishes the humanities from other modes of understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Vincent Colapietro, Philosophy<\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4099,"featured_media":12133,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[294],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bb-25-fall-past"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4099"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12131"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12224,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12131\/revisions\/12224"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}