History
Welcome to the history home page of the Santa Fe College. The point of this page is to acquaint students with the classes and instructors available at the college. By clicking on the appropriate link, students can view course descriptions and sample syllabi of the courses he or she desires.
Please note that not all course are taught every term.
Perhaps we might want to ask the following question.
What is history?
This is a deep subject.
Some argue that History is a science, one of the social sciences. Those who hold that History is a social science believe that with the proper application of the techniques of social science-statistics and the objective collection of empirical data, for example-they can achieve conclusions no less valid than those achieved by other social scientists. This idea of the social sciences is a rather late creation and related to those sciences that are observer dependent. For instance, Geology or Biology are not dependent upon the observer as there could be rocks or organisms without people. For this reason Aristotle, for instance, studied biology, as did Anaximander with geology. Neither, however, would have understood the category "Sociology."
Yet both Anaximander and Aristotle would have understood the category "History," and not only that, they would have read it. This, in part, explains why there are those who believe that History is an art rather than a science. They would point out that history comes from an older tradition than the social sciences. Indeed, it even has a muse-Klio. Moreover they assume that all conclusions drawn about that transcendental variable, humans, are inconclusive at best and thus it may be better to think of the craft of history as effort to learn valid lessons, instead of actual laws, from the past. A great French mathematician and historian of science Pierre Duhem once said, "science is prediction" (in French of course). Historians are bad at that. One must hasten to add that historians know with great certainty that the past existed. It is just exactly how and why it existed we are not sure of.
So why study history?
Once again a deep subject.
The best answers are these. At bottom, humans tend to learn from analogy. A child learns to ride a bike by trying and failing, and perhaps failing some more until they eventually succeed. A biologist learns about a disease by studying its life cycle. We all learn from examples.
On a related note we all remember our own past experiences and try to make sense of them. It matters not whether it is eating sushi or falling in love that we tend to learn from our own pasts. Finally there is the larger subject of the nature of the liberal education and the creation of what the Germans (and some educated others) call a Weltanschauung, or world view. One of the major points of a college education is to emerge from one's studies with some kind of feeling about the past, present, and future, as well as an overall sense of the place of humanity in this veil of tears called life. Historians do not, in most cases at least, know this answer, and we offer no classes containing it. However, with an additional degree of patience, fortitude, and understanding, no other form of study can better equip students to develop such an opinion as that of history.
