ABSTRACT
From Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry” (1821) through C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” (1959), the humanities’ classic rhetorical stance has been one of defense in the face of science. This defensiveness has marginalized the arts, but even more damaging is the assumption that natural sciences are precise while the human sciences are generalistic. But, in contrast to the objects of nature – by defi nition alien from the theories that attempt to explain them – human objects and actions are theoretically open to full and complete understanding, even if this understanding must adopt specifi c strategies and forms in the face of the paradoxes of selfreference (“we are what we study”).
