The main proposal of the article is to bring into focus humanism as a project which was always present in the Renaissance philology and is still into the main areas of reflection of the Enlightenment and Modernity. The large part of the article consists of a review of the philological tradition since the Renaissance, and it tries to describe an interdisciplinary nature of cultural studies, which always referred to politics and political science, and comparative multilingual approaches, which made them strictly international. Recent development in the area of digital humanities makes cultural studies similar to media studies. Humanism is the only component of the studies which is indispensable because it is not to be replaced by artificial intelligence.