More recently, Richard Rorty has argued that the distinction between the sciences and the humanities is harmful to both pursuits, placing the former on an undeserved pedestal and condemning the latter to irrationality.
Rorty’s position requires a wholesale rejection of such traditional philosophical distinctions as those between appearance and reality, subjective and objective, replacing them with what he endorses as a new ‘fuzziness’.
Such postmodernists argued that the humanities should go beyond the study of "dead white males" to include work by women and people of color, and without religious bias.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault has been a very influential part of this movement, stating in The Order of Things that "we can study only individuals, not human nature."
Councils give grant funds to individuals, scholars, and nonprofit organizations dedicated to the humanities in their region.