According to Williams and other scholars like Erwin Panofsky, the proper features of such a discipline include:
While many associate the term strictly with the "Humanities" or "Arts," thinkers like Williams and Jacob Bronowski argue that even science or biology (such as the study of ants) can be practiced as a humanistic discipline if the study helps us better understand our own place in the natural world. Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline humanistic discipline
: It must attend to history—specifically the "historical activity of understanding where [our ideas] came from"—because these ideas are contingent and have evolved over time. According to Williams and other scholars like Erwin
