THE ANXIETY OF IRRELEVANCE Digital Humanities and Contemporary Critical Theory

Traditional humanistic disciplines feel irrelevant and marginalized in Europe and Anglophone countries. Instead of demonstrating the insights into humans, their communities, and values that only philosophy, literature, and the arts can provide, many humanists repudiate their base in favor of scientific models. This turn to philosophic naturalism the belief that only knowledge derived from natural sciences has credibility underlies much current work in the humanities and social sciences. Similarly, the digital humanities, purportedly rooted in 'computational thinking', were born with a bias toward science. This paper addresses the loss of confidence in the explanatory value of critical and aesthetic methods of literary inquiry through the work of Richard Rorty. He holds that science and philosophy employ different kinds of thinking and do different work: science asks 'how' questions, philosophy asks 'why'. Confusing two incompatible epistemes will not improve the status of the humanities. It is this same epistemic confusion that the digital humanities must also negotiate.