The unity of knowledge: integrating scientific and humanistic perspectives in academic research and teaching.

Speaker

ISA Visiting Fellow - Dario Maestripieri

Full Professor University of Chicago

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The integration of scientific and humanistic disciplines in academic research and teaching (‘consilience’) is grounded in the concept of the unity of knowledge. Opponents of consilience argue that there is a difference between factual or propositional knowledge (i.e., ‘objective’ knowledge) produced by science and philosophy through theory, empirical data, or logic-based argumentation, and ‘understanding’, defined as ‘knowledge in the form of realization’ (or ‘knowing what’s like to …’), produced by the humanities and the arts through the subjectivity of individual perception, or lived experience, or cultural or moral relativity. It may be argued that ‘understanding’ is not a distinct type of knowledge, but simply perspective-taking. Moreover, both the sciences and the humanities can explore and explain both subjective and objective aspects of self-knowledge (i.e., of what it means to be human). Therefore, all knowledge is objective knowledge and there is no conceptually valid argument for the separation of science and humanities. As an example of the integration of art and sciences in the pursuit of knowledge about the human mind and human behavior I discuss several ‘psychological novels of ideas’. These are novels in which the authors (e.g., Luigi Pirandello, Italo Svevo, Elias Canetti) used fiction to explore ideas about human thinking and human behavior imported from psychology or evolutionary biology.