Category: sciences-humanities

New 3QuarksDaily-column:

For better or worse, Dutch 20^th-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

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.

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.

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