The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
Language: English
Pages: 66
ISBN: 1614275475
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
2013 Reprint of 1959 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This is the publication of the influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow. Its thesis was that "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into the titular two cultures - namely the sciences and the humanities - and that this was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems. Published in book form, Snow's lecture was widely read and discussed on both sides of the Atlantic, leading him to write a 1963 follow-up, "The Two Cultures: And a Second Look: An Expanded Version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution."
Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing
Discussion of Kuhn’s work in Gary Gutting (ed.), Paradigms and Revolutions: Appraisals and Applications of Thomas Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science (Notre Dame, 111., 1980). 36The extensive recent literature is helpfully surveyed in Jan Golinski, ‘The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory: Sociological Approaches in the History of Science’, Isis, 81 (1990), 492–505. 37For a representative recent example, see David Locke, Science as Writing (New Haven, 1992). 38Wolf Lepenies, ‘The Direction.
Xavier to Schweitzer, have devoted their lives to Asians and Africans, nobly but paternally. These are not the Europeans whom Asians and Africans are going to welcome now. They want men who will muck in as colleagues, who will pass on what they know, do an honest technical job, and get out. Fortunately, this is an attitude which comes easily to scientists. They are freer than most people from racial feeling; their own culture is in its human relations a democratic one. In their own internal.
Suffering, different from that which is intrinsic in the individual condition. But this suffering is unnecessary and can be lifted. This is the second important thing which we know—or, if we don’t know it, there is no excuse or absolution for us. We cannot avoid the realisation that applied science has made it possible to remove unnecessary suffering from a billion individual human lives—to remove suffering of a kind, which, in our own privileged society, we have largely forgotten, suffering so.
In the previous generation, H.G. Wells. In fact, Snow’s early admiration for Wells provides one key to understanding the dynamics of the ‘two cultures’ controversy. A particularly revealing piece of evidence is the review of Wells’s Experiment in Autobiography which Snow published in The Cambridge Review in 1934. Snow made clear that he admired Wells as ‘a great writer’ and ‘a remarkable man’, sympathising with his ‘urge for a planned world’, but he also indicated that he was irritated by the.
Conceptions of how to think about human well-being, and, partly because it provoked the public expression of such strong feelings (and strong words), it has since been taken as emblematic of the very division Snow had attempted to identify. The text of the Rede lecture was published in Encounter in two parts, in June and July 1959, and the August number then included a small symposium of immediate responses.19 These reactions were overwhelmingly favourable, and Snow was praised for his.