Antiquitopia

There has been seemingly increased discussions of what unites the humanities and the sciences.  One area that seems to unite different branches of knowledge is creativity , as well as a sense of wonder.  In a more limited scope, the ancient historian Robin Lane Fox reflects on the limits and potentials of creativity in historiography versus fiction.  In his Travelling Heroes , he begins with what looks like the basic assumptions of those writing fiction versus those writing history: Novelists, surely, need to imagine, whereas earthbound historians have only to collect as mundane information as survives. (p. 4)  Yet he begins to break down this dichotomy of data gathering versus creative imagination, showing the constraints in fiction and the role of the imagination in history-writing: Yet novelists become constrained by their own creations and by the need for them to be coherent as they develop.  Historians must amass and collect but they then have freedoms...

To be "interdisciplinary" has been a catchword for well over a decade in the academic world; grants are based upon it, jobs increasingly rely upon it, and, who knows, perhaps the future of the university will be based upon it.  It can lead to provocative (yet unlikely and perhaps silly) proposals , but also genuine collaboration.  Sometimes "interdisciplinary" isn't very much so:  it is often the confluence of people in different departments on their own side of the humanities/sciences divide.  The question remains how sciences and humanities can learn from one another in a mutually beneficial dialogue?  E.O. Wilson suggests that we have a common basis in story --whether you are a novelist or a physicist, you are essentially telling a story.  You may use a different set of vocabulary, different degrees of metaphor (although Lakoff and Johnson might say that all our language is essentially metaphoric), but we want to tell a story.  The best scholars t...