ABSTRACT
The sciences and the humanities have a long tradition of cultural crossings and reciprocal influences; this interwoven history, however, has been first somehow minimized and downplayed during the nineteenth century, and then simply slipped into a far corner of our memories – feeding on contemporary hyperspecialization and high disciplinary boundaries – until recent scholarly work evidenced how our narrow contemporary perspective was compromising a thorough understanding of the modern era. Positivism and the professionalization of academic disciplines brought about a very critical attitude toward the intellectual syncretism of the foregoing centuries. This had several consequences as, as well described by Richard Olson,
nineteenth-century practitioners of the human and social sciences virtually stopped reading and giving serious consideration to their eighteenth-century predecessors, taking literally the Comtian notion that knowledge of the human interactions in society attained the status of positive knowledge only in the nineteenth century. In this perception, they were cutting themselves off from their roots in a way that has persisted into the late twentieth century. 1
