Category: sciences-humanities

Otto Neurath and the things that unite us

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

In 1919, Otto Neurath was on trial for high treason, for his role in the short-lived Munich soviet republic. One of the witnesses for the defense was the famous scholar Max Weber.

Neurath was a capable scholar with good ideas, a newspaper recorded Weber as saying; but recently he seemed to have somewhat lost his grip on reality. That judgment would refer to Neurath’s economic thinking. In particular, his belief that a planned economy was viable, to an extent that the entire money economy could be abolished. This conviction, the seeds of which were planted by the economic thought of his father, and which was strengthened by his study and experience of war economies during the 1910s, would in fact be lifelong; Neurath would always be thinking of concrete ways to make co-operation and planning a reality.

More here

The atom bomb and the two cultures: I.I. Rabi on the sciences and the humanities

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

Several years before C.P. Snow gave his famous lecture on the two cultures, the American physicist I.I. Rabi wrote about the problem of the disunity between the sciences and the humanities. “How can we hope”, he asked, “to obtain wisdom, the wisdom which is meaningful in our own time? We certainly cannot attain it as long as the two great branches of human knowledge, the sciences and the humanities, remain separate and even warring disciplines.”

More here

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

In one of the opening scenes of The Chair (2021), we are treated to an ideal-typical self-diagnosis of a struggling English department. Its new chair, Ji-Yoon Kim, narrates:

I’m not gonna sugarcoat this: we are in dire crisis. Enrollments are down more than 30 percent, our budget is being gutted. It feels like the sea is washing the ground out from under our feet. But in these unprecedented times, we have to prove that what we do in the classroom – modeling critical thinking, stressing the value of empathy – is more important than ever, and has value to the public good. It’s true, we can’t teach our students coding or engineering. What we teach them cannot be quantified, or put down on a resumé as a skill. But let us have pride in what we can offer future generations. We need to remind these young people that knowledge doesn’t just come from spreadsheets or Wiki entries. Hey, I was thinking this morning about our tech-addled culture and how our students are hyperconnected 24 hours a day, and I was reminded of something Harold Bloom wrote. He said: ‘Information is endlessly available to us. Where shall wisdom be found?’

More here

Giambattista Vico Enters The Classroom

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

It’s my favorite topic of the year, I tell the kids, before scanning my conscience for signs that I have just lied to them. No, this feels about right, and in any case, they didn’t need my reassurance: after a dry unit about ratios, at my mention of the word “probability” I can practically hear the sound of neurons firing. Whether they know of any contexts in which chance turns up? Boy, do they. My twelve-year old students inform me about dice, cards, spinners, lotteries, casinos, about your chances of survival in Squid Game, about unearthing rare minerals in Minecraft, and about whether the stuff you want to buy is actually in stock because sometimes they run out and there’s no telling in advance when. Also the weather.

I love introducing them to the math of probability precisely because it is a topic that they have already thought about so much, but that I know many of them have incoherent intuitions about. Not that I don’t, of course, but I am a little bit ahead of them and I know from experience what I am working with. Somebody will opine that the chance that it’s going to rain next month is “fifty-fifty” because it either will or it won’t. Somebody will say that there is a 1/7 chance that someone’s favorite day of the week is Thursday. Somebody will reason that since the highest sum you can roll with two D6-dice is a 12, the chance you roll a 10 is 1 in 12, which…

Oh wait, is it? Anyway, you get the point: the process feels properly Socratic, taking slightly muddled concepts that students already feel strongly about, and providing the right nudges to make them reconsider some of those concepts and make others click together. It is a significant source of satisfaction every year to see just how fast ‘the group’ moves from guessing that a sequence of three coin flips has six possible outcomes (unless it can land on its side, which they also unerringly point out), to calculating the number of four-digit pin codes where all the digits have to be different.

More here

“A good way of knowing things”: Eric Hayot’s defense of the humanities

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

Unfortunately, it is always worth your time to read a book in praise of the humanities. Given the unenviable position of the humanities in public education and in contemporary cultural and (especially) political discourse about valuable expertise, any author that comes to their defense has to find a strategy to shift the narrative, and will thereby almost invariably do something interesting.

They move our focus from economic value to democracy and citizenship, for example. Or they argue that there is not actually a mismatch between the skills provided by a well-balanced liberal arts curriculum and the demands of technocapitalism, or that the humanities themselves produce the same kinds of intellectual goods as the natural sciences with which they tend to be contrasted.

More here

Windmill-bashing Squared

(new 3QuarksDaily-column)

The most charitable, forward-looking take on the science wars of the 90s is Stephen Jay Gould’s, in The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox (2003), a delightful book about dichotomies between the sciences and humanities. His diagnosis is primarily that scientists have taken too literally or too seriously some fashionable nonsense, and overreacted; and if everybody can just calm down already, things will be alright and both sides could “break bread together” (108). Gould saw the science wars themselves as a marginal and slightly comical skirmish, almost a mere misunderstanding. “Some of my colleagues”, he said,

“have become legitimately disturbed by a few truly silly and extreme statements from the ‘relativist’ camp, largely made by poseurs rather than genuine scholars, and have mistaken these infrequent sound bites of pure nonsense for the center of a serious and useful critique. Then, falsely believing that the entire field of ‘science studies’ has launched a crazed attack upon science and the concept of truth itself, they fight back by searching out the rare inane statements of a few irresponsible relativists […] and then presenting a polemic defense of science, ultimately helpful to no one”. (99)

… (more here)

‘Theologians And Other Fuzzy People’ Two 20th-Century Dutch Novelists On The Sciences And Humanities

New 3QuarksDaily-column:

For better or worse, Dutch 20th-century postwar literature comes with a canon of three authors: Gerard Reve, Harry Mulisch, and W.F. Hermans. There, you learned something today. Other than this factoid, however, this post is not going to be a lecture about the landscape of Dutch literature, or even the literary qualities of these authors. I am introducing them because I am going to use two of them, and one in particular, to illustrate a point about discourse involving the landscape of science – that is, the distinction between the sciences and humanities.

The notion of a separation between the sciences and humanities usually revolves (again, for better or worse) around C.P. Snow’s famous Rede lecture. In this lecture, Snow tentatively suggests that what he calls the ‘scientific culture’ is probably more left-wing than the ‘literary culture’, as well as more progressive (scientists “have the future in their bones”). In his time, he saw his technocratic ideals represented best by the Labour party, to which he served as scientific advisor. In the 1970s, however, Snow (as chronicled by historian Guy Ortolano)[1] would drift away from the Labour party, and express himself in increasingly negative terms about all the nonsense one had to put up with as a liberal these days. Before his death in 1980, he expressed his sympathy for neo-conservative ideas.

More here

‘A Condition for Survival’

New 3QD-column:

“For many years now a division has been established in our universities between the sciences and the humanities. This division is probably more absolute now than it has ever been before.” Thus complains, in 1946, the British Marxist scientist John Desmond Bernal.

It is a worry that seems to anticipate C.P. Snow’s later famous cri de coeur about the ‘two cultures’. Indeed, the two scientists knew and respected each other; Snow called Bernal “quite obviously and with no fuss about it, a great man”. More interesting than the question of priority, however, is the question why Bernal made this observation when he did, and with this sense of urgency.

More here.

“Oh, the humanities!”

New 3QD-column:

The Big Bang Theory has been one of the most successful sitcoms in TV history. Last month it ended. In many ways, it ended a long way from where it had begun; many commentators have noticed how the show has evolved together with cultural norms in the past decade. Its first seasons milked gender-stereotypes to a toe-wrenching extent; later, the main cast included more women, and generally changed its tone on gender and science – even making it a theme in several episodes.

Still, a sitcom like BBT needs its stereotypes, and BBT’s idea of geek culture did remain stereotypical; if not on the level of gender, then in other ways that I want to explore here.

More here.

That Time Petrarch Yelled At A Doctor For Dozens Of Pages

New 3QD-column:

I don’t know how much you know about Petrarch. My guess is that you know him as a poet, primarily for his sonnets. Maybe you associate him with early Italian humanism and its reinvigorated dedication to the wisdom of classical Antiquity. Or perhaps you think of him as someone who expressed transcendental truths about the soul and its searching and wandering nature.

All of this may be true. As of recently, however, I can’t help but think of him as that guy who spent dozens of pages (more than 80, in a modern printed edition) yelling at a physician.

Or yelling at all physicians, possibly. Petrarch is slightly abstruse about the extent to which he seeks to put down physicians in general, or some subclass of physicians, or this singularly annoying physician in particular.

More here