Events

22 September 2010

2010 New Zealand Aronui Lecture Series: Two Cultures Fifty Years On

Lecture

2010 New Zealand Aronui Lecture by Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve, Past President of the British Academy and Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge.

The humanities and science were once seen as entirely different cultures. Now that we appreciate their similarities, how will looking at the world through two lenses influence our future?

In his 1959 Rede lecture The Two Cultures, C.P. Snow contrasted what he called ‘the traditional culture’ of literary study with the culture of natural science, and judged them wholly different in approach and achievements. The scientifi c culture, as he saw it, was rigorous and productive; the literary culture was neither. However, a wider look at inquiry in the humanities and the natural sciences reveals a very large overlap in approach. In both domains inquiry relies on interpretation and inference, aims at empirical truth claims and relies on normative assumptions, in variable proportions.

Philosophy

Organisation:

The Royal Society of New Zealand