The Third Culture – A New Way to Insightfully Understand the World: A New Way to Insightfully Understand the World

Author: Brockman
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-04-01
Features: The Third Culture is a powerful concept. There is some consensus among humanities intellectuals that only they possess the landscape of knowledge and are the source of criticism, whereas in fact, non-fiction writers, most of whom are scientists, completely own the fascinating ideas that people are willing to read and understand. Some of us are good writers who can express themselves well. Unfortunately, there are some people in the field of arts and humanities, and even in the social sciences, who take pride in their near-ignorance of science and technology or mathematics, whereas the opposite is rarely seen. You occasionally encounter a scientist who doesn’t know Shakespeare, but you will never encounter a scientist who takes pride in not knowing Shakespeare. The scientists representing the emerging Third Culture are not typical scientists but those who are somewhat more broadly knowledgeable. This is a tradition—100 years ago, intellectuals were scientists—natural philosophers.