On Ways of Knowing

In 1958, Sir Charles Snow (known best as C. P. Snow) delivered the Rede Lecture at Cambridge University. He entitled this famous talk, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” in which he described how scientists and the literary community were so divided they could hardly speak to each other (Snow 1959). Their shared goals, interests, and methods had radically separated and when coupled to the vast discrepancies in resources, the sciences flourished while the humanities began a slow decline. ¹ Because he was a physical chemist and published novelist, he seemed well-positioned to make such a pronouncement. He also offered a prescriptive remedy by arguing for scientific literacy, a view that was then contested as a disguised form of subordinating the arts and humanities to the sciences and thus displacing the liberal intent of education.