surprisingly for us – music . If music can be as much a branch of mathematics as astronomy , are we sure that physics is not a humanity ?
The term ‘ scientist ’ is even newer – coined in 1834 by , then Master of Trinity College , Cambridge . The move represented another re-grouping , or rather re-fissuring of the academic landscape . In earlier centuries those who understood experimental or theoretical study of nature were ‘ natural philosophers ’ – a term that much later in the 19th century Michael Faraday and James Clark Maxwell still insisted on using . They preferred it for the very reason that it situated the contemplation of electricity , magnetism , chemistry and geology within a much wider tradition of thought that included ethics , aesthetics – and all the wider categories of human reflection that ‘ philosophy ’ entails .
Is science a humanity ?
Tom McLeish FRS , Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics , University of York
What sort of question is that ? Just look up the departments within any university faculty of ‘ Arts and Humanities ’ and you won ’ t find Physics , Chemistry or Biology . In a few places you might find a ‘ social science ’ or two , but sociology , anthropology and their friends and relations are more likely to be cloistered behind the walls of their own faculty . Yet the question needs asking , even to challenge those very structures , apparently so self-evident that they are .
We are accustomed to this disciplinary tradition of fragmenting the ways in which humans think about and engage with the world . So accustomed that it is hard to recognise the arbitrariness of the dividing walls of learning as to appreciate the artificiality of fields in the countryside . Yet , just as field-patterns were very different in past centuries , so the hedges within academia also used to take very different courses . Not long before the foundation of Sevenoaks School , for example , most students at the early European universities of Bologna , Paris or Oxford would have started with the ‘ trivium ’ of rhetoric , grammar and logic . Having mastered those , they would graduate to the mathematical disciplines of the ‘ quadrivium ’: arithmetic , geometry , astronomy – and
There is more to the deeper resonances of ‘ natural philosophy ’ over ‘ science ’ than the origins of the words themselves . The newer word , of Latin origin , is essentially a knowledge claim – a territorial and dominating view of human engagement with the world . The older term , however , of Greek provenance , speaks of ‘ the love of wisdom to do with nature ’ – at one time a very old , but also a remarkably refreshing perspective on science . It is more humble , more participative , and recognizes that knowledge on its own , without wisdom , is incomplete .
Science , reappraised as natural philosophy , touches the human condition more explicitly , for there was never any sense in claiming pure objectivity in even our most mathematically rigorous models of the physical world . Their creators , as subjects , are as involved in the process of understanding nature by re-describing it , and as reliant on imagination , as are poets when they shape the force of imagination by the constraints of form . ‘ Science has forgotten the debt is owes to the imagination ’, mourned George MacDonald , the writer and poet who inspired the literature of both C . S . Lewis and J . R . R . Tolkien . A century earlier , the great German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , warned that
Nowhere would anyone grant that science and poetry can be united . They forgot that science arose from poetry , and failed to see that a change of times might beneficently reunite the two as friends , at a higher level and to mutual advantage .
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