THE battle between those who think character comes from nature and those who think nurture is the key is not confined to students of humanity.
But it is a significant step nevertheless, and its deceptive simplicity represents an enormous advance in how students of humanity and society – academics or otherwise – think about religion.
In 1910 it was said that Anatole France "shared with Tolstoy the distinction of being the greatest and most daring student of humanity living", and in 1921 he was awarded the Nobel prize.
A great student of humanity, and a brilliant actor by necessity — he could remain incognito in hostile territory for months, when being found out would have meant his own death — Burton speaks to a belief that, in the trying on of many selves, he might find another, or at least more of himself.
Considering himself a student of humanity, he has spent years studying the intersection of personal achievement and spirituality.
Academia is suffering from the same fiscal squeeze plaguing all public institutions, and students of the humanities are being hardest hit as education wakes up to the triumph of the quants that business figured out long ago.
He's even inspired a piano concerto, "Body Loops," and a quintet that was given its premiere at Lincoln Center last week.. "For students of the humanities, the key neurophysiological insight of our time is that which has been so eloquently expressed by Antonio Damasio," declared Jonathan Bate, a Shakespeare scholar at the University of Liverpool in the Times Literary Supplement last December.
The instrument is designed primarily for university students of the humanities and the social sciences.
Morality is a subject for philosophers, theologians, students of the humanities, indeed for all thinking people.
