Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 127.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2023-06-26 07:14:38+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: science and the humanities

What we do in 'digital humanities' is dependent on a technoscientific
device, a computational machine, though only some of us are interested
in that dependency. However much we skirt around our relation to the
natural sciences, it's there to be considered. Some, like me, would even 
say that we must consider and more it to know what we're doing.

But here's a complication. Despite the learned arguments by Peter
Galison et al. concerning the Disunity of Science (the title of a book
he did with David J. Stump (Stanford, 1996), we still refer to 'science'
in the singular, as they did, and as Emil Toescu and Ádám Tuboly do in
an issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews about to be published. But
we always refer to 'the humanities' in the plural; 'humanity' is
something rather different. This difference complicates because it
allows the unity of the natural sciences to remain a robust idea despite
their huge diversity. The plurality of 'the humanities' does the opposite.

Comments?

Yours,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews;  Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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