Disciplinary Distinctions before the “Two Cultures”

Abstract

C. P. Snow's conception of “two cultures” has been readily applied to modern European and especially Anglo-American contexts and used to bemoan the negative impact of disciplinary distinctions. But in the pre-modern period, disciplinary distinctions prevailed along different fault lines. I consider two examples of the dynamics between the disciplines in medieval and early modern Europe to argue that distinctions between the disciplines can foster crucial benefits along with the tensions and obstacles to interdisciplinarity of which we are more often aware. In the medieval university the institutional and intellectual separation between philosophy and theology gave the former an important measure of protection and independence from the cultural dominance of the latter. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the long-traditional distinction between mathematical disciplines and Aristotelian physics was gradually abandoned, and distinctions akin to those Snow identified were first commented on during the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns (c. 1687).

Notes

Notes

1. Benjamin Cohen, “Science and Humanities: Across Two Cultures and into Science Studies,” Endeavour 25 (2001): 8–12.

2. The lecture was translated into Swedish in 1961, German, Norwegian and Spanish in 1963, Italian in 1964, Catalan in 1965, French in 1968, and Russian in 1973. See Paul W. Boytinck, C. P. Snow: A Reference Guide (Boston: Hall, 1980), 9, to which I can add Die Zwei Kulturen: literarische und naturwissenschaftliche Intelligenz, trans. Grete and Karl-Eberhardt Felten (Stuttgart: Klett, 1963), and Le due culture, trans. Adriano Carugo (Milano: Feltrini, 1964). A partial translation appeared in China in 1984 entitled “Liang-zhong wenhua” in Zhongguo wenhua 1 (1984): 454–65, as cited in Tongqi Lin, review of Scientism and Humanism: Two Cultures in Post-Mao China (1978–89), Philosophy East and West 47.4 (1997): 610.

3. German discussions of Snow's thesis have been and continue to be particularly active. While the term for the natural sciences is quite stable (“Naturwissenschaften”), those for the “humanities” range from “literarische Intelligenz” (used in the German translation of Snow's original and in Helmut Kreuzer ed., Literarische und naturwissenschafltiche Intelligenz, C. P. Snows These in der Diskussion [Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987]) to “Bildung” (in Werner Kutschmann, Naturwissenschaft und Bildung, Der Streit der “Zwei Kulturen” [Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1999]), and “Geisteswissenschaften” (in Jost Halfmann and Johannes Rohbeck ed., Zwei Kulturen der Wissenschaft revisited [Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2007]); see Die Zwei Kulturen, Forum Clausthal, Heft 12 (2000). Others use the English terms; e.g. “Zwei Kulturen” at http://science.orf.at/science/rosenstrauch/4222 (consulted 17 September 2007) switches to English terms by the third section entitled “Trennlinien zwischen ‘Sciences’ und ‘Humanities.’” For an international discussion in English, see Meeting the Challenges of the Future. A discussion between the two cultures, ed. Walter Rüegg, Balzan Symposium 2002 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2003).

4. Paul Feyerabend presents an extreme version of this position in Against Method (London: NLB and Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1975).

5. See, for example, Nancy G. Siraisi, History, Medicine and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, Press, 2007).

6. Oxford English Dictionary, consulted on-line 17 September 2007: “Humanity” section 4a: “Caxton, Gold[en] Leg[end] 121a/2. He floured in double science  … that is to saye dyvynyte and humanyte.” The first occurrence of the plural “humanities” is dated to 1702 in section 4b.

7. On Aristotle's separation of the disciplines, see Malcolm Wilson, Aristotle's Theory of the Unity of Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 8–9. For Renaissance reaffirmations of this principle, see Neal Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), e.g. 8, 146–47.

8. For a brief survey of classifications of knowledge, see my “Organizations of Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 287–303.

9. The question of the order in which to teach the disciplines was somewhat different and less often discussed; see Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method, 30–31.

10. See James Weisheipl, “The Nature, Scope and Classification of the Sciences,” in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David Lindberg (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 461-82, at 467.

11. On their development, see Universities in the Middle Ages, ed. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

12. David Lindberg, “The Transmission of Greek and Arabic Learning to the West,” in Science in the Middle Ages, 52–91.

13. A Source Book in Medieval Science, ed. Edward Grant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 47.

14. See Richard C. Dales, “The Origin of the Doctrine of the Double Truth,” Viator 15(1984): 169–79; Martin Pine, “Pomponazzi and the Problem of ‘Double Truth,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 29 (1968): 163–76; and J. M. M. H. Thijssen, “What Really Happened on 7 March 1277? Bishop Tempier's condemnation and Its Institutional Context,” in Texts and Contexts in Ancient and Medieval Science, ed. Edith Sylla and Michael McVaugh (Brill: Leiden, 1997), 84–114.

15. For an introduction to this topic, see John F. Wippel, Mediaeval Reactions to the Encounter between Faith and Reason (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1995).

16. See Dales, “The Origin of the Doctrine of the Double Truth,” 173; more generally, Thomas Aquinas, Siger of Brabant, St Bonaventure, On the Eternity of the World, trans. Cyril Vollert et al. (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1964).

17. For more on the latitude of forms, see John Murdoch and Edith Sylla, “The Science of Motion,” in Lindberg, Science in the Middle Ages, 206-64, at 231–41.

18. See, more generally, Daniel Callus, “The Function of the Philosopher in 13th-century Oxford,” in Beiträge zum Berufsbewusstsein des mittelalterlichen Menschen, ed. Paul Wilpert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1964), 152–62; John Marenbon, “The Theoretical and Practical Autonomy of Philosophy as a Discipline in the Middle Ages: Latin Philosophy 1250–1350,” in Knowledge and the Sciences in Medieval Philosophy: Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Medieval Philosophy Helsinki, August 1987, ed. Monika Asztalos, John Murdoch, and Ilkka Niiniluoto (Helsiniki: Yliopistopaino, 1990), 262–74. For a different perspective on the “two cultures” in the Middle Ages, see Lynn White Jr., “Science and the Sense of Self: The Medieval Background of a Modern Confrontation,” Daedalus 107 (1978): 47–59.

19. For a brief survey of the multiple strands of natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, see my “Natural Philosophy,” in Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 365–406.

20. See Richard Westfall, “The Rise of Science and the Decline of Orthodox Christianity: A Study of Kepler, Descartes and Newton,” in God and Nature, ed. David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 218-37.

21. On the development of the new literary and artistic fields, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (1951): 496–527 and 13 (1952): 17–46. “Belles-lettres” does not appear in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie in 1694 and is first attested in English in The Tatler in 1710 according to the Oxford English Dictionary (both consulted on-line 17 September 2007).

22. E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). Among other insightful critiques, see D. Graham Burnett, “A View from the Bridge: The Two Cultures Debate, Its Legacy, and the History of Science,” Daedalus 128 (1999): 193-218, at 213–14.

23. Thomas S. Kuhn, “Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science,” in The Essential Tension. Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 31–65.

24. William Laird, “The School of Merton and the Middle Sciences,” Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 38 (1996): 41–51.

25. See, for example, Michael H. Shank, “Mechanical Thinking in European Astronomy (13th–15th centuries),” in Mechanics and Cosmology in the Medieval and Early Modern Period, ed. Massimo Bucciantini et al. (Florence: Olschki, 2007), 3–27.

26. Robert Westman, “The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Theory,” Isis 66 (1975): 165–93; and Peter Barker and Bernard Goldstein, “Realism and Instrumentalism in 16th Astronomy: A Reappraisal,” Perspectives on Science: Historical, Philosophical, Social 6 (1998): 232–58.

27. William Wallace, Galileo and His Sources: The Heritage of the Collegio Romano in Galileo's Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

28. For introduction to these developments, see I. B. Cohen, The Birth of A New Physics, updated ed. (New York: Norton, 1985).

29. Nicolaus Copernicus, De revolutionibus. On the Revolutions, trans. Edward Rosen (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), preface, 5.

30. On the reception of Galileo, see Richard Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine and the Bible (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1991); on an early attempt to remove Copernicus from the Index of forbidden books, see Pierre-Noël Mayaud, La condamnation des livres coperniciens et sa révocation  à la lumière de documents inédits des Congrégations de l’Index et de l’Inquisition (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1997). More generally see John L. Heibron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

31. Linnaeus for example made a point of creating a barrier to entry into the practice of natural history; see Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

32. See Antonio Pérez-Ramos, “Bacon's Legacy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Francis Bacon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 311–34.

33. See Marc Fumaroli's long preface in La querelle des anciens et des modernes, ed. Anne-Marie Lecoq (Paris: Gallimard, 2001); and Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

34. Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, ed. H. R. Jauss (Munich: Eidos Verlag, 1964), 98 (sig e iiij r-v of the 1688 edition provided in facsimile).