What exactly are the Liberal Arts?

[MysticDevice]

All the descriptions and explainations have been kinda vague so I'm still wondering what they are exactly.

[Soteris]

First of all, there is no hard definition which means there will be people arguing if something is part of liberal arts or not and both would technically be just as right.

To snag a snippet from Wikipedia:
"The modern sense of the term usually covers all the natural sciences, formal sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities."

Natural sciences are basically the scientific category of studying the world. It includes: Biology, Earth science (such as geology and more), Atmospheric sciences, Oceanography, Astronomy, Planetary science, Chemistry, Physics plus arguably a few more. Basically, everything in "nature".

Formal science is the science of abstract concepts such as logic, math, computers, information science and whatnot.

Social sciences is the scientific study of societies and relationships. It includes a truly massive number of fields such as:
Law, politics, economics, Education, History, Psychology, Sociology, Gender studies, Linguistics etc..

Arts are sort of like individual skills to express creativity. Things like story telling, painting, singing, sculpting, dance and movie making just to name a few.

Lastly, "Humanities", this is more of a catch-all term for everything else. If some things are excluded from the other categories they are often moved into this one while still being under the category of "Liberal Arts". As such there are significant overlap with other categories such as including language or dance or law or education but they usually approach these subjects from a different direction.

Where as the previous categories tries to come from a scientific point of view, of using evidence and such, Humanities is more philosophical about the whole thing.

But all that said, I must point out once again that there is no hard definition of these things. They are more of something that the majority of people agree on than an actual definition.

[MysticDevice]

Gotcha, so its about a general of a term as the word "science" is. So to speak

[Soteris]

While there might be sciences not part of liberal arts you can pretty safely say that most if not all science is part of liberal arts. That said, it also includes many things that are not science as well. Liberal arts is a massive category containing all kinds of things.

[NamerOfStars]

Music, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The "liberal" in their name isn't in opposition to conservatism, but in opposition to slavery- these were the arts of a free man.