I want to thank Donald Drakeman, Peter Harrison, Douglas Ottati, Michael Ruse, and Lisa Stenmark for their highly relevant contributions. Each of these distinguished authors responds to my book What Are the Humanities For? with relevant questions and observations. While responding to my book, they also bring their own professional and personal background to this conversation. To organize my response, I will focus on three major questions.

1. Do the humanities form a coherent domain?

2. Is the aspiration of value‐free knowledge Western and Colonial?

3. How do these reflections on the humanities relate to “religion and science?”

Do the Humanities Form a Coherent Domain?

In his well‐argued contribution, Peter Harrison raises the question whether the humanities form a coherent domain “I am not entirely convinced that the humanities comprise a coherent domain, but wonder at the same time whether a rhetoric of coherence might be important for their defense” (Harrison 2021, 680). As illustration of the importance of having rhetorically effective ways to present one's disciplines, he points to the efficacy of the label STEM, to designate the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Another recent example of effective disciplinary marketing might be the label “the life sciences” to claim a separate domain alongside the physical sciences. As long as it was a rather modest branch of the natural sciences, one can understand Immanuel Kant's remark that it would be absurd to expect “that there may yet arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws”—as quoted by Michael Ruse in his contribution (Ruse 2021, 699).

With the rise of molecular biology and an evolutionary understanding of long‐term development, the life sciences have their fundamental approaches—their “Newton.” And now, they claim their standing as a distinct domain alongside the physical sciences. Having adequate labels is a matter of academic politics, as there is a competition for funds. But distinguishing the physical sciences and the life sciences is not merely rhetorical. The distinction does correspond to developing insight into reality.

For the humanities, I do not think that one can make the case for the humanities by pointing to fundamental theories. In this domain, explanatory theories have a more limited role for a reason. There is the coexistence of insider and outsider perspectives, of a third person description and a first‐ and second‐person interaction. The coexistence of those different perspectives is a consequence of a major feedback loop in the humanities. Studying humans is done by humans: those studied may be affected by the way scholars come to understand them, and the scholars may be affected by their insights about the humans studied. The two fundamental orientations for the humanities, alongside scholarly description and analysis, are a hermeneutical one, seeking to understand others as persons, and a philosophical one, critical reflection on one's own convictions and arguments. On this basis, I hold that a case can be made for the humanities as a coherent domain, characterized by three fundamental orientations—the third person outsider perspective (seeking to have knowledge), the relational, hermeneutical, second person quest to understand other persons, past and present, and the first person perspective, the reflection on our own ideas and identities.

Though I do not agree that the attempt to paint a coherent picture of the humanities is merely rhetorical, it is, of course, also a matter of academic politics, of communication to administrators and with the general public. A precursor to the book was an inaugural address in 2015, when I became dean of the Tilburg School of Humanities, a faculty of humanities in a business‐oriented university, without programs in history or languages, the archetypical programs of humanities schools. That address, Naked Ape or Techno Sapiens: The Relevance of Human Humanities clearly had a threefold “political” intent: within the school it had to serve as a narrative that would give “us” as faculty a shared identity, it had to convince the executive board that this school of humanities was relevant to the university as a whole, and it had to show others in the country that Tilburg University also had a school of humanities. Thus, I agree with Harrison's observation that this has a rhetorical purpose, a way of presenting the humanities to promote them by projecting coherence. But I hope it is not merely a rhetoric of coherence. As argued above, in the coexistence of insider and outsider perspectives, of objective knowledge and personal engagement, the humanities have characteristics not found in the same way in other domains of scholarship.

The tentative definition of the humanities I offer in my book, is as follows:

Humanities are academic disciplines in which humans seek understanding of human self‐understandings and self‐expressions, and of the ways in which people thereby construct and experience the world. (Drees 2021, 12)

Michael Ruse, in his contribution, challenges this working definition of the humanities as too broad and too narrow.

Ruse thinks the definition is too broad, as the social sciences also deal with “human self‐understandings.” An example he gives is the question whether people behave rationally during a financial crisis. However, when economists consider humans “rational beings” who look for optimal profit, this is not about how those humans understand themselves. It is a rationality the economist attributes to them. In the book, I adopt the distinction between agents and actors from Martin Hollis (1994). Rain is an agent, as it affects the world. Humans are agents too, but they are also actors. As persons they have intentions; they act for a reason. In those terms, the social sciences deal primarily with humans as agents, bypassing individual motives and self‐understandings. In the humanities, they are approached as persons whose self‐understanding is involved in their actions, and may be affected by those actions and their consequences. The boundary between these wide disciplinary domains may be fuzzy, but the central orientation differs.

The definition is also too narrow, Ruse asserts. To make this case, he appeals to the philosophy of mathematics. I agree that mathematics is not among the humanities, as defined above. However, philosophy of mathematics is the study of human practices, of measuring and counting, of their subsequent abstraction in pure mathematics, and of possible ways to understand their claim to truth, rationality, and meaningfulness. I do not see why this would not be a branch of philosophy, and hence an analysis that belongs to the domain of the humanities, just as a history of mathematics would fit within the history of knowledge.

Ruse adds a more personal note: “As a philosopher, I don't feel much akin to others in the humanities” (2021, 694). To what extent are such feelings philosophical arguments? It may well be that a linguist feels disciplinary closer to a cognitive psychologist than to a historian. I do not see how such matters of taste are relevant for the proposed characterization of the humanities. Except, that is, that my account would not deliver the internally directed rhetorical function to generate a shared identity as a faculty.

Douglas Ottati addresses disciplinary distinctions in relation to institutional contexts. In his American context, the humanities are primarily involved in liberal arts education that seek to further general education and personal development. Such programs are under pressure as the point of higher education “has become to equip people to make money in a commercial technocratic environment dominate by business degrees and STEM” (2021, 705). Given my own history and my European background, I refer more to disciplinary programs, including those in religious studies and theology.

As a theologian teaching at a liberal arts college, he reflects on the coexistence of theology and religious studies. These two disciplines have different agendas. Ottati (2021, 713) writes: “The task of a church theologian, then, is to deepen, extend, and reinterpret the affectively charged piety and theological vision of a particular religious community in order to help express and guide the contemporary self‐understandings and lives of its members in changing circumstances.” Such a relation to a particular community is not shared in the same way by the humanities scholar. But members of religious communities are also citizens and humans; they share in conversations beyond the boundaries of their own community. And others, perhaps not affiliated with any such community, may be interested in what those fellow humans believe and hold dear; they might be their neighbors, their colleagues, or the parents of children in the same school. But for religious studies, scholars’ academic allegiance takes precedence. “Distinctions still matter. (…) But there are reasons to think it may be helpful for these tasks to be undertaken in proximity to one another, and occasionally perhaps even by the same person” (Ottati 2021, 715).

I agree. Such proximity is helpful for theology, operating in a world where people understand their lives in ways informed by historical, scientific, and anthropological knowledge and encounter the plurality of religions and within religions. The coexistence of these two disciplinary orientations, theology and religious studies, is also helpful for the humanities, as theology, alongside philosophy, is a disciplinary orientation that brings to the table the self‐involving character of such studies.

Ottati writes of a theologian associated with a particular church. Details differ from place to place, but everywhere we are challenged to consider critically our own beliefs and practices in pluralist contexts informed by historical knowledge and insight in human behavior. Thus, we all have to face the same academic standards. That was the context for a chapter on responsible scholarship, within which I argued for the paradoxical value of “value‐free” scholarship.

Is the Aspiration of Value‐Free Knowledge Western and Colonial?

Although Harrison raises the question whether speaking of the humanities is rhetorical, and in that sense political, Stenmark (2021) challenges my approach to the humanities as wrong politics. The book might be appropriate “within the Western Academy” (Stenmark 2021, 719), but its understanding of scholarship is Western, colonial, Eurocentric.

If I understand her contribution correctly, she considers Western and non‐Western approaches to scholarship as two opposing views of the relationship between ontology and epistemology, that is, between reality and our knowledge. “Western scholarship treats as self‐evident that ontologies establish epistemologies” (Stenmark 2021, 723). Thus, as she understands it, the Western approach seems to be that ontology comes first, and knowledge arises as the understanding of “what is there.” This approach pretends to offer universal, objective knowledge of facts and laws. The non‐Western approach prioritizes epistemology, that is, the stories people tell each other, how they understand their world and how they thereby construct their world. My book has the deficiencies typical of the Western Academy.

I find this binary opposition—either ontology or epistemology takes priority—odd. All knowledge claims are human claims (epistemology), but they seek to be about the reality we engage (ontology). Thus, rather than having to choose sides, the central issue of philosophy is how to relate those two, that is, how our human ideas relate to reality. Furthermore, it is odd to associate only one emphasis with the West. Within Western intellectual history, there have been empiricists and realists, who leaned toward knowledge as reflection of the way things are. And there have been idealists and constructivists who paid more attention to the human as the one who constructs knowledge. Just to illustrate who might be included in the second cluster, I mention Immanuel Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), Karl Popper's Zur Logik der Forschung (1935), and Imre Lakatos's Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes (1970). Speaking of the Western Academy as if it is characterized by one view, the priority of ontology over epistemology, imposes homogeneity where there is far more nuance and diversity.

Drawing on her schematic two stances, she finds my book representative of a Western approach to scholarship. In her description of my position, she writes: “As with the natural sciences, it is important to establish ‘the facts first’” (Stenmark 2021, 721). The words cited, “the facts first,” are in the original part of the following sentences: “Given the challenge by Geertz, my own emphasis [in this section of the book's argument] on establishing the facts first is an overstatement. Facts are constructed by a process of interpretation. Preliminary ideas … are part of the scholar's input” (Drees 2021, 106f.). It is odd to see those three words, “the facts first,” cited as characterizing my approach, whereas these are—even within the sentence within which they appear—challenged, as facts arise through interpretation. Even the word “construction” appears in this sentence, and in the tentative definition of the humanities cited above.

More generally, my understanding of the humanities involves four approaches. There is an interest in particulars, for example, knowing a language, studying an archive, studying the history of a religious text, and in patterns that may be found across particulars—grammar being the most straightforward example. In this sense, one might see the humanities as scholarship that is analogous to biology, where there is the study of many different plants and animals and the ecosystems within which they function, and there is the quest to understand those on the basis of general mechanisms and principles. So too for astronomy, where there may be many different galaxies and a wide variety of stars with planets, each of interest as one of the many possibilities, while also a testing ground for theories about the evolution of stars and planets. Although there is such an emphasis on knowledge, similar to knowledge in the natural sciences, the main emphasis in the book is different. This is already announced in the initial chapter that introduces the definition and adds two other types of knowledge. Knowledge is also hermeneutical, engaging others as persons. Thus, the title of Chapter 2, “Understanding Others.” And knowledge involves self‐understanding, the reflection on our arguments and assumptions (philosophy) and on our identity (theology); thus the title of Chapter 3, “Self‐involving: Philosophy and theology.”

Stenmark argues that knowledge is situated in relation to a particular world; it is relational. “any understanding of objectivity or facts as somehow independent of the world is counterproductive because objectivity distorts whatever it is we are attempting to understand. Drees does acknowledge that subjective judgments are relevant for, for example, ethics, but this understanding extends beyond ethics” (Stenmark 2021, 725). As far as I understand my work, I do not claim that knowledge claims need not take context into account. Even more surprising to me is that Stenmark, after arguing that this extends beyond ethics, in the next sentence comes up with an overwhelmingly moral example, of the understanding of the Nazi death camps. I respectfully differ on the helpfulness of this example to point out my intellectual shortcomings and the risk of a Western and colonial bias.

A criticism that is related to the one on a naïve understanding of facts is one that suggest that I seek to justify the humanities by emphasizing their similarity to the natural sciences. As a description of my strategy, Stenmark (2021, 721) writes: “The natural sciences gain credibility through methodical research and results, the discovery of things like natural laws. The humanities also apply methodical research and, looks for patterns and anomalies in the human world. … This tendency to compare the humanities to the natural sciences to support its epistemic and scholarly value is not unique to Drees, of course, and it might be that his audience is predominantly made up of scientists and he wants to find a point of reference. Or, perhaps, it reflects that curious habit of the humanities to emulate the sciences as a way to compensate for the uncertainty of our disciplines.”

I can repeat the remark above. The two substantial chapters preceding the one she draws on are primarily about the hermeneutical effort to understand others with the complexities that such an effort involves, and the self‐reflective effort in philosophy and in relation to particular identities, exemplified here by theology. In those chapters, the effort is not at all to present the humanities as analogous to the natural sciences, but rather to point out that there are central elements that are not found in the natural sciences. Positively stated, I think the humanities and the natural sciences can coexist as important human efforts because they are different, and hence complementary, though as responsible scholarship, there are “similarities and differences,” to quote the heading of a section in this chapter (Drees 2021, 111). What she ascribes to me, is a position I explicitly discuss in the first chapter, the fourth chapter (which she mostly draws upon), and the final one, on the value of the humanities, and each time I criticize this approach for its incompleteness. The main author representing that position, which emphasizes knowledge of particulars as an avenue to discovering patterns, is Rens Bod, in his A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Patterns and Principles from Antiquity to the Present (2013).

Thus, I think that Stenmark misrepresents my reflections on the humanities, by focusing one‐sidedly on remarks that involve reference to “facts” and to the natural sciences. To some extent, our approaches may be closer than she makes it seem (Drees 2010, 2014—a review of Stenmark 2013). But there is also a fundamental disagreement, about the value of the aspiration to develop knowledge that is “value‐free.”

We both hold that academic scholarship involves ethical responsibilities. However, to her, this implies taking a partisan stance, whereas I think ethical responsibility as a scholar is in the aspiration to be as non‐partisan as possible. Personal and political preferences may play a role in decisions regarding the topics one studies, but such preferences should not determine the outcome. One should not argue for a conclusion because that is the conclusion one likes, or the one that the one who finances the research prefers, or that the people studied hold dear. A comparison I make is with the neutrality of a referee in sports. As a person, the referee may have his likes and dislikes. However, while serving in that particular capacity, the referee should work with the rules of the game and assess the actions of both parties by those rules, in a fair, non‐partisan way. Of course, judgments may favor one party over the other, but those judgments should be based on evidence that is appropriate to that game. There are professional values involved in scholarship, strengthening academic cooperation (e.g., honesty) and intellectual accountability (e.g., transparency regarding sources). But the question whether the conclusion a scholar draws is the one that is preferred by those studied is irrelevant.

In the book, I discuss as an example the reception of a study on Hinduism by the American scholar Wendy Doniger. Some Hindus were offended by the book, and Penguin India decided to withdraw the book from the market in India. As her opponents saw it, this was an outsider, a non‐Hindu, an American, writing on that which was theirs. Her understanding of Hinduism was offensive to them. Critics in India were supported by Hindus living in diaspora in the United States (Malhotra 2016). Should one side with these critics of Western historical scholarship because that was “the” voice from Hindus?

Doniger's book The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009) was based on careful study of texts, in their original languages. By scholarly standards, this is not disputed research. She finds that in early Hinduism, animals were sacrificed and their meat was eaten, including the beef of cows. It was only gradually that in many strands of Hinduism, animal sacrifices and the eating of beef was banned. Doniger also points out the sexual character of various symbols. And, so she finds, the ideal of nonviolence is not as univocal and ancient as one might think. More generally, she distinguishes between two major strands within Hinduism. There is a puritan strand that has become the model for the Hindutva movement currently in power in India. And there is the sensual artistic imagery and poetry of worldly Hindus. She sees puritan Hindutva Hinduism with its emphasis on philosophy and meditation as a modern phenomenon, owing much to the influence of the Victorian British. She finds that an alternative has been suppressed, “the pluralistic, open‐ended, endlessly imaginative, often satirical Hinduism. The Hindutva‐Vadis are the ones who are attacking Hinduism; I am defending it against them” (Doniger 2014). If, as Stenmark seems to demand, the Western scholar would have to defer to “the people,” one may well find oneself unintended on the side of those who are currently in power, materially or ideologically, deciding what is supposed to count as their perspective.

A similar concern was central to a contribution by Daniel Dennett, quoted by me, that Stenmark found “jaw‐dropping.” Dennett's argument was that playing down science may well‐undermine public health and raise infant mortality, and be to the disadvantage of women, homosexuals and other minority groups. He criticized “post‐modern science critics,” who promote a particular idea, which he discusses as analogous to a virus. “The virus they introduced was not a macromolecule but a meme (a replicating idea): the idea that science was a “colonial” imposition, not a worthy substitute for the practices and beliefs that had carried the Third‐World country to its current condition” (Dennett 2000, 94). An example, not mentioned by Dennett, was the denial by the South African president of HIV as the virus at the basis of AIDS, and thus the refusal to use anti‐viral drugs—a policy that has led to much unnecessary suffering. Stenmark complains that I do not give a reference to the examples that had inspired Dennett. His short text is publicly available, also as a preprint on the web; the examples he refers to come from India and elsewhere.

Stenmark (2021, 728) wonders whether I am suggesting that “the humanities should not criticize science, for fear that it will make things worse.” I do not see where she gets that. I do not think that the role of the humanities is to “criticize science,” but I have absolutely no problem with scholars in the humanities discussing the way science functions, by itself and in particular contexts, nor with humanities scholars challenging “scientism” when scientists pretend to base moral, political or religious conclusions on the basis of empirical research. Stenmark also writes: “Moreover, his assertion that ‘well‐established’ knowledge helps the poor and oppressed, as opposed to those in power” is unjustified, as “knowledge works to the benefit of those in power” (Stenmark 2021, *15). Again this is an overstatement; I am not claiming that it always will help the poor, but I do point out that knowledge often is unwelcome to those in power, and especially to those in power on unjustifiable grounds. Doniger's work on Hinduism is an example thereof, but so too has been the rise of historical‐critical Biblical scholarship since the days of Erasmus and Spinoza, discussed earlier in my book, which has been a challenge to authorities in Christian churches.

In his very readable contribution to this book symposium, Donald Drakeman writes on academic freedom: “The issue on which we agree that is probably generating the strongest opposition at the moment” (Drakeman 2021, 733). In light of the contribution by Stenmark, he seems to be right that arguments for academic freedom and role‐specific neutrality are quickly caught up in ideological warfare. It seems to me that this is not a fight between the West and the Rest, but primarily a culture war that takes place within the United States, though it is exported by representatives from both sides as an “either/or.” Drakeman's original contribution makes clear that the desire to pursue knowledge that is as free as possible from personal, religious, or political interests as possible, and thus role‐specific neutrality, arises not out of a lack of concern for the well‐being of people elsewhere. It is needed in order to be able to serve the well‐being of peoples around the world.

Religion and Science?

What Are the Humanities For? is not a book about religion and science. However, this book symposium is published in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. My approach to the humanities reflects that I have been involved in reflections on religion and science for well over three decades, while serving in academic leadership roles in humanities schools for just over a decade. As mentioned above, I discern four types of scholarship in the humanities—the study of particulars, the attempt to discover general patterns, the understanding of other persons, and self‐reflective engagement with our arguments and convictions. “Religion and science” involves those four elements as well. Knowledge, though often knowledge generated by scientists rather than by scholars in the humanities. An interest in others as persons, seeking to understand their beliefs and practices, even if those are not one's own. And an interest in the consequences for one's own convictions.

Peter Harrison offers a broader perspective on the way the current predicament of the humanities relates to the historical trajectory of science and religion (if we anachronistically allow ourselves to use those modern categories). His historically informed analysis made me even more aware of the extent to which my analysis is situated in the present, or at least, in a modern cultural context where the natural sciences set the paradigm for knowledge. The theological framework, that as a sacred canopy (Berger 1967) shaped life and learning before the modern period, has lost its undisputed position. Harrison writes: “The present predicament of the humanities, I would suggest, turns out to be linked to a broader pattern of secularization that has obviated appeals to the intrinsic value of anything” (Harrison 2021, 687). He thereby opens up reflections on the humanities that require a much wider engagement with cultural history than I offered in my book that seeks to understand the humanities today.

Rather than focusing on the historical trajectory, Drakeman highlights the importance of the humanities by giving attention to some issues outside the academic sphere. The academic study of religion religions is needed, as there are 5 billion fellow humans who understand themselves as religious. What we might think of as past is also part of the present for many. As Drakeman writes, “most people are conventional moral thinkers, and large numbers of them understand themselves as being religious. Those religious self‐understandings may well include commitments to particular religious values in life‐and‐death decision‐making contexts” (Drakeman 2021, 738). Given the self‐involving character of the humanities, studies of religion should inform philosophical reflections on appropriate and inappropriate roles for religion in the public sphere, as in the works of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and others (Stout 2004).

Drakeman goes beyond the academic sphere in another way too. He quotes a passage where I seem to hold that appreciating the humanities for their practical value, as problem‐solving, would imply a shallow and naïve view of society. As he points out, most people understand themselves also as employees, or owners, of commercial enterprises. I agree that my formulation was too massive; it would have been more adequate if I had said, as he suggests, that treating the humanities as solely practical might be shallow.

With this criticism comes an interesting observation: “the desire for a sharp divide between the humanities and practical things has been with us for millennia” (Drakeman 2021, 739). A classic example, in my opinion, has been the role of learning the classics, Latin and Greek, as entry ticket to the learned and civilized upper class. In the introduction of the book, I have made clear that I dislike a nostalgic view of the humanities that may be associated with such an orientation. I do not think that the humanities should deal exclusively with “high culture” with its associated elite; the humanities are about all fellow humans.

Drakeman concludes his valuable contribution with a section on critical thinking. The humanities do not necessarily promote such critical thinking, but they should. With the rise of the Worldwide Web, information is easily available. “We scholars are no longer the keepers or curators of the universe of knowledge” (Drakeman 2021, 742). Our role as teachers has changed; we are no longer the filter for knowledge. Rather, we must teach students to navigate the universe of online sources, assessing their plausibility and rhetoric. He quotes me on this but has expressed it more clearly than I had done.

To conclude, I want to thank again Peter Harrison, Michael Ruse, Douglas Ottati, Lisa Stenmark, and Donald Drakeman for their critical reading of my book and their reflections on that which is important to themselves. Thus, they contribute to a human conversation that is characteristic for the humanities.