Great minds don't think alike: Bringing sciences and the humanities together

The two-culture split has come to symbolize a wider and growing gulf in academia between the sciences and humanities.

It cuts directly to the heart of the liberal arts curricula of schools across the globe and to the widespread yet markedly wrong perception that the humanities are an anachronism in a world driven by technology.

• What we now call the sciences started to chart their own path away from the Greek philosophical tradition.
• The 17th century marked a turning point in human intellectual history when this divergence started.
• Direct experimentation and data analysis empowered them to describe a variety of terrestrial and celestial phenomena with mathematical precision.
• Their spectacular success changed the way we understand the cosmos and our place in it.

• As influential thinkers promoted science as the sole source of "truth," the humanities lost some of their clout.
• The relentless ascent of scientific thinking brought the contempt of many humanists who considered themselves the only worthy intellectuals.
• Most scientists returned the disdain, considering the humanities to be worthless for their intellectual pursuits.
• Frontiers of knowledge broadened and academic departments multiplied.

• The split between the sciences and humanities is largely illusory and unnecessary.
• Developments in the physical, biological, and neurosciences now leave such narrow-minded antagonism looking problematic and corrosive.
• Many of the key issues of our times call for constructive engagement between the two cultures.

• We must reach beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and create truly cross-disciplinary ways of thinking.
• Who we are and what we are, form an irreducible whole.
• It is more than just academic questions that call for the sciences and humanities to come together.

• There is a new culture emerging, inspired by questions old and new that reside at the very core of our pursuit of knowledge.
• The choices we make now as we shape our curricula, create academic departments and institutes, and engage in discussions with the general public, will shape the nature of intellectual cooperation for decades to come.