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This chapter returns to a series of challenges posed famously in C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, particularly Snow's assessment of the science-literature agon and his perceived privileging of science. Less a contribution to the so-called Culture Wars than an attempt to understand Snow's arguments about culture and history, this chapter is especially concerned to rethink his later rejection of thermodynamics as the model for intellectual inquiry. In its place Snow identifies molecular biology and the new science of DNA as the ideal measures of scientific literacy and the ideal intellectual model for both cultures. In the figure of the double helix, Snow finds evidence that at the molecular level the material world is a work of art. From this new perspective on the “two cultures,” the chapter returns to the art–nature debate that was central to the literary and scientific works under consideration throughout this book.

This chapter examines the engagement of Scrutiny contributors and F. R. Leavis's pupils with wider publics. F. R. Leavis's idea of ‘minority culture’ was not simply ‘elitist’ but envisioned a chain of ever larger ‘publics’ that could be guided indirectly by a critical minority. The chapter discusses his own public interventions during the 1960s and 1970s, and contrasts them with those of his followers, who went in for the sorts of popularizing usually practised by British intellectuals in the twentieth century. The focus is on the seven-volume Pelican Guide to English Literature edited by Boris Ford, which projected Scrutiny interpretations to a mass audience. Working from the Penguin archives, the chapter charts the series's publishing history, and explores the ways the context of a survey text affected critical judgements in the Scrutiny mode.

This chapter offers a balanced, symmetrical account of the sciences and humanities as complementary disciplinary clusters representing different but equally valuable sets of epistemic stances and intellectual practices. It goes on to explain how, under pressure from changing intellectual and institutional conditions and culturally pervasive loaded dualisms (e.g., real work and mere play, real things and mere words), the symmetry breaks down and becomes invidious comparison, mutual misunderstanding and mutual antagonism. Noting that the asymmetrical Two-Culture ideology reflected in the recent “science wars” continues to dominate public views of the academy, the chapter concludes by urging mutually respectful interdisciplinary interaction but arguing against either the possibility or the desirability of a unification of all knowledge or, as currently proposed, a “conceptual integration” of all disciplines.

The distinction between the humanities and the natural sciences is often described in terms of two types of description, “thick” versus “thin,” or two modes of apprehension, “interpretation” (Verstehen) versus “explanation” (Erklären). This chapter argues that, although it is rarely made explicit, these distinctions are themselves fundamentally based upon the metaphysical assumption of mind-body dualism: humanistic meaning cannot be captured by physical description because it involves the mind, which belongs to an ontological realm separate and independent from the realm of the merely physical or bodily. One of the primary rationales for bridging the science-humanities divide is that, in light of work over the past few decades in various branches of the cognitive sciences, the mind-body dualism is growing increasingly empirically untenable. However, it would also appear that such dualism is a human cognitive default, which means that, for creatures like us, the chain of science-humanities integration will never be seamless: We will always feel a jolt when we cross from the physical to the mental, from the merely biological to the human, from ultimate evolutionary reasons to proximate psychological mechanisms. Understanding this fact will help us to see why the humanities-science divide continues to prove so difficult to negotiate, as well as why something like this divide will always have some traction in human psychology.

The Epilogue returns to the theme of the Introduction, and suggests ways in which this history sheds new light on recent trends in neuroscience—not to offer a full history of the present, but to exploit suggestive structural parallels between the history told in this book and neuroscientific developments of the past decade. It suggests that a historically grounded understanding of the articulation of the relationship between localization and a principle of “connectivity” helps reframe anxieties about the place of neuroscience in contemporary academic culture, and in particular in the humanities. 92

This chapter examines the formal and thematic (dis)continuities between the earlier and later Quartet novels. It studies the prism of Byatt's involvement with modern notions of the breakdown and fragmentation of language in Babel Tower and her fictional considerations of the narratives of science in A Whistling Woman. This chapter determines that her later fictions usually study the conceptual pitfalls and possibilities of ways of world-making across the ‘Two Cultures’ divide.

This study has placed Paul in a long tradition of inventive experimentation with spectacle and technology centred on London, arguing that he should be acknowledged one of the key pioneers of what became cinema. It has stressed how his engineer’s training encouraged him to develop early film forms, seeking to increase audience engagement, alongside his continuous efforts to improve film apparatus. If these achievements have not been widely recognised, this reflects Britain’s unevenly divided attitude towards literary culture rather than science, as well as its uneasy relationship with film as a technology-based popular art. However, with growing appreciation of the material basis of modern media, and the readier access to their archaeology afforded by digital media, wider recognition of Paul’s significance may finally be possible.

This chapter, written jointly by a rhetorician and a neuroscientist, offers a concrete example of the analytic benefits entailed in interdisciplinary collaboration between the two academic cultures. By first outlining various limitations and constraints of laboratory science on emotions, the chapter highlight the hardening of the “two cultures” divide in recent research on emotions. In particular, a recent injunction against “reverse inference” in neuroscientific practice has rendered the establishment of casual connection between brain activation and emotional states more difficult. More promising from a humanities perspective appear to be experiments that draw on a “situated emotions” approach, which explicitly incorporates language and audience considerations into experimental design, and into interpretation. Finally the chapter outlines necessary concessions from each side: a realization among humanists that laboratory research requires the isolation of one key variable over others; and a recognition among scientists regarding the historically and socially specific environment in which emotions take shape.

This chapter asks how, in the context of the medical humanities, we might productively think across disciplinary domains and boundaries. It draws on Ian McEwan’s Saturday as a focus for positioning the question of interdisciplinarity within a specifically British context. The first section, ‘The two cultures’, surveys the ‘two cultures’ debate and its legacy and discusses the appearance of Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’ at a critical point of the novel. In the second section, ‘A third culture?’, the focus turns to McEwan’s engagement with popular science discourses and argues that it underpins a discernible conservatism in his work. The final section, ‘An unbounded view’, reads Saturday against the grain to argue that, in McEwan’s treatment of dementia a more positive, open-ended model for thinking across the arts and sciences might be seen to emerge.

The focus of this chapter is the fundamental point of commonality between Julian and Aldous Huxley: their sense that the future wellbeing of the human race would depend on a more integrated approach to human experience, and the creation of a more ecologically sustainable form of civilization. In an age of increasing specialization and mutual hostility between what C. P. Snow would call “the two cultures” of the sciences and humanities, Julian and Aldous Huxley each exemplified a more holistic approach to the human experience. Echoing the seventeenth century scholar Sir Thomas Browne, they described human beings as amphibians, though each of them drew a different meaning from this metaphor. In addition to a more integrated vision of human nature, Julian and Aldous Huxley each helped to advance the environmentalist movement that emerged after 1945.

Chapter 1 examines influential texts published during the 1990s, by Oliver Sacks, Kay Redfield Jamison, Temple Grandin, Richard Powers, and David Lodge. The argument of the chapter is that these writers had not yet coalesced into a school or tradition but that they shared a set of implicit assumptions. All of these texts emphasize the fundamental roles of physiology in the making of identity but suggest also that physiology is meaningful only in the personal, social, and political contexts of live experience. In addition, they represent their writers’ attempts to blur lines between C.P. Snow’s infamous “two cultures”—science vs. the humanities—by emphasizing the phenomenology of living with a brain. While these texts helped established a zeal for neuroscience that would later be termed neuromania by theorists critical of simplistic cultural responses to neuroscience, they also contained the seeds of more sophisticated approaches to understanding relations between brain, self, and culture.

The epilogue, co-authored with University of Michigan ecological neuroscientist Stephanie Preston, exemplifies collaborative work across emotion science and the humanities. By first outlining various limitations and constraints of laboratory science, this chapter highlight some recent hardening of the "two cultures" divide in emotion research. Then it discusses experiments that show how laboratory research on emotions can be modified by the critical and rhetorical methods that distinguish the humanities. Classic laboratory studies of fear, for example, document the persistence of unconscious white vs. black bias while, at the same time, neglecting circumstances like the history of racial slavery that could provide causal explanations of just the sort that these same scientists first raise, then anxiously defer. More promising from a humanities perspective are experiments that draw on a critically informed, situated emotions approach, which explicitly incorporates language and audience considerations into experimental design, and into interpretation.

This chapter establishes three important themes of the book. First an historiographic observation: the history of emotion is in some important way a corollary to a history of personhood. Second a methodological injunction: when studying emotion, one should be able to characterize the relationship between the subject and object of analysis. Third a critique of “two cultures“: the work of humanists and scientists is not incommensurable; humanists and scientists share significant interests in emotion studies. Humanists with the epistemological commitments and training associated with interpretive method, and ethnographic, cultural, and literary readings, should recognize that their own research and critical reflection on their own methods in fact align them closely with versions of appraisal theory, emotion regulation theory, and non-modular understandings of neural functioning. Indeed those working in the humanities run the risk of placing themselves in performative contradiction when they step back and view the modern science of emotion strictly as historians.

E.O. Wilson’s “consilience” project adopts a particular reductionist conception of the word consilience, as opposed to the more generally accepted meaning—among philosophers—of inference to the best explanation. The author argues that Wilson’s project is a misguided throwback to the ideals of logical positivism, which have been shown by philosophers of science to be ultimately incoherent. Instead, the author proposes that a better way of thinking about the relations between the sciences and the humanities requires a broader view of what counts as knowledge, as well as situating knowledge itself within the even broader context of human experience and understanding.

It can be shown that the different conceptions of ‘simulation’ (the one of culture critique on the one hand and the denomination of technical applications on the other) that seem to be incompatible with each other can be reconciled on a single spectrum. Its basis in models, its replacement of reality, its lack of reference and of precession of the referent are some pejorative characteristics often emphasized in media philosophy with regard to simulations, for which the sciences applying computer simulations have no use for. It helps crossing over the views that first seem opposite to each other, but that turn out to be compatible if its root in reality is recognized and thus the representational logic is accepted at least according to the intention. The chapter combines ideas of the 'simulacrum' retrieved in the natural sciences with traces of cybernetic thinking in media studies. The whole study builds on a definition of computer simulation in the technical sense as the involvement with and the act of execution f a dynamic mathematic or procedural model that projects, depicts, or recreates a system or process.