Abstract/Summary

This article responds to Bridges’ call to rethink the character of the humanities in the face of their record of inhumanity by interrogating the fitness of means proposed to end desired. If Bridges’ narrative of the inhumanities is to be accepted, this leaves little reason to hope that the cycle could be broken by any new, substantive account of the human. Instead it locates hope in the potential for critical correction and enlarging of perspective exemplified in Bridges’ examples, proposing a hybrid account of the humanities’ value that combines Bridges’ ‘epistemological’ argument about the power of the humanities to generate innovative solutions to real-world problems with an ‘existential’ argument about the epistemic limitations of human nature.