Pantaleon, F. 2025

Each significant era in the history of the humanities possessed a justification for those studies that humanized man, those which make man “more man.” The ancient Greeks held paideia as the form of education that fashioned the ideal man—the man of excellence and moral beauty—and it was toward this ideal that the various disciplines of their time aimed at.

The ancient Romans professed humanitas, humanity, through the program of studies called the litterae humaniores, the more humane letters by which a person could be more highly humanized. In the early Italian Renaissance, the humanist movement appropriated a term first used by Cicero—studia humanitatis—to refer to a well-defined cycle of studies which put special emphasis on the study of classical Greek and Roman writers.

The studia humanitatis was the means by which man endeavored to study himself qua man. Today, the humanities are in need of a justification because of the profusion of scientism and relativism across domains of knowledge, which have to some degree infected the humanistic disciplines themselves. Some efforts are put in place to counteract this growing phenomenon, and at the University of Asia and the Pacific, Julián Marías is beginning to be staple figure.

One of the reasons is that Marías’s philosophy of human life and the human person is viewed to be a way to ground the humanities, a way to justify them, as an enduring and worthwhile area of study. Beyond that, his philosophy justifies the humanities because what he says about the person, the humanities show; and what the humanities say about the person, Marías shows. Hence, Marías’s philosophy serves a double function of justification: (1) as a defense, an apologia, or a vindication against the attacks of relativism and scientism, and from the problems that plague them from within, and (2) as a way to verify how the humanities exemplify the person just as Marías discovered the person.

Keywords: Julián Marías, humanities, justification, human life, human person