Reassessing Humanism and Science

Abstract

The notion that and are inevitably opposed to one another in their content, methods, and goals, has multiple origins which reinforce its currency. While one can trace the fear that scientism would undermine traditional morality and mythology back to the Athens of Aristophanes,' the more relevant source for the twentieth-century sense of a gulf between the notorious two cultures2 lies no doubt, as Owen Hannaway argues below, in the segregation in the European educational system since the nineteenth century between classical studies and scientific and technical training. The cultural biases engendered by this split made it easy for historians like George Sarton or Lynn Thorndike to conclude that Renaissance humanism, with its concern for elegant style and ancient books, was inevitably antithetical to the skills of observation, experiment, and mathematization on which modem was built. The role of humanism was further diminished by the spate of works from Pierre Duhem and Anneliese Maier to Alistair Crombie which emphasized the continuity between late medieval developments in methodology, the of motion, and other fields and Galileo's formulations.3 On this view, the humanist interlude of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was at best a holding ground for the medieval seeds of the Scientific Revolution; at worst it actually threatened to sterilize them. In reviling the humanists for their bookish attention to philology historians merely took their cues from the founders of modern science themselves, those self-styled prophets of a new intellectual order and

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