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In this seminar, we will discuss the intersections of language, literature and science since the 17th century. We will discuss the origins of a specifically scientific style of thinking and writing in the 17th century and will look at a few key texts of Anglophone science writing by key thinkers as well as popular science writers such as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Stephen Hawking or Stephen Jay Gould. Moreover, we will trace key stages in the conflict between what C.P. Snow called “the two cultures” – the sciences and humanities –, which has repeatedly flared up since the early nineteenth century. We will trace the conflict from Thomas Love Peacock ("The four ages of poetry", 1820) and P.B. Shelley ("A Defence of Poetry", 1821) in the Romantic period via Th.H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold in the Victorian Age, the controversy between C.P. Snow and F.R. Leavis after the publication of Snow's notorious The Two Cultures in 1959, all the way to the heated debates in the wake of Alan Sokal's 1996 hoax article, by means of which the theoretical physicist sought to expose the alleged pretensions of some branches of the humanities.
A reader with suggested texts will be available in the copy-shop Reckhammerweg from early October onwards, but participants are expected to take an active role in shaping the course of the seminar. |
