Book Review: The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century (original) (raw)

PHILOSOPHY AND THE THIRD CULTURES

Abstract. This article provides an analysis of the place occupied by philosophy in relation to the two cultures -science and humanities- in so far as philosophy may play the role of a "third culture". This position is compared with other efforts to establish that third place on behalf of the reflections of natural scientists or of Sociology as a third scientific form in face of the mentioned dichotomy. The thirdness of philosophy is also considered in face of another well known dichotomy -science/technology- by the assignation of sense as the proper trait of its reflections, opposite to truth as the intended property of the propositions of scientific theories, and to the efficacy linked to technological productions.

The Two Cultures: Where are we now?

The FEBS journal, 2018

In 1959 the physicist and novelist C. P. Snow described a schism in Western society. He said that the Sciences and the Arts were, in effect, 'two cultures'. How does that appraisal look to us now? This article looks at a development Snow cannot have anticipated - the current academic orthodoxy of 'Critical Theory', and an associated mistrust of scientific knowledge ….

Thinking Like a Man? The Cultures of Science

Women: A Cultural Review, 2003

Reading too much to see, writing too much to think', licensed intellectuals today are usually too cut off from wider audiences even to deserve the Wildean derision they once received. Yet the public domain has its wellknown hazards. Academics rarely set its agenda, even when we do manage to address an audience beyond the barely-read journals stringent funding bodies force us into. Accordingly, I did not set the agenda when I agreed to present a session in Birkbeck's public lecture series: Close Encounters: Culture Meets Science. An odd situation, when I have tried to be the sternest critic of the dualism such 'encounter' excites-however intimate. The battle lines are familiar in Britian's upmarket media: while wellknown psychiatrist Raj Persuad can be heard arguing that science needs art, the equally recognizable biologist Lewis Wolpert insists that never the twain shall meet. Beyond binary conflicts, however, not only does culture include science but, more significantly, science includes culture. To say this is to say, one might think, very little; yet it remains profoundly contentious-the ground for endless battles. It is to suggest, merely, that at any time we come to the sphere of science with all our everyday pre-conceptions in place. At least in the world of human and social affairs, the nature of the empirical research which gets done and, in particular, the way it is broadcast and popularised, whether by scientists or their promoters, always reflects the assumptions and goals of the culture around it, or certain pockets of it. And in the dazzling techno-world we now occupy the extraordinary degree of information available to us itself triggers ubiquitous debates over science, which is altogether a good thing if-and only if-it does not lead to instant polarizations. Culture includes science; science includes culture; yet it is certain that, throughout modern times, it is a mutual stand-off between what is seen as the two separate traditions which has encouraged the most intensely sectarian forms of professional rivalry, animosity and conflict, both within and without the academy. The eternal return of wars supposedly between culture and science or, put more judiciously, within the "two cultures", take us back at least to where most date the birth of Reason, to the 1780s. This was when the philosopher Immanuel Kant (troubled by David Hume's empiricism) awakened from his 'dogmatic