No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Abstract
I dispute a widespread contrast between the sciences and the humanities that undervalues the latter compared to the former. This contrast assumes that science is more valuable than the humanities because it is more useful, an assumption I reject on the grounds that (a) science is not more useful than the humanities and (b) the value of usefulness, being instrumental, depends on the non-instrumental value of what it's usefulness for. I conclude that science is not made more valuable than the humanities either by its instrumental or by its non-instrumental value.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2015
Footnotes
1
Ancestors of this paper were presented and discussed at the Cambridge University Moral Sciences club on 9th October 2012, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 1st May 2013, Dalhousie University on 3rd May 2013, and King's College London on 28th February 2014. My revisions of them owe much to helpful comments made on those and later occasions.
References
2 Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959)Google Scholar.
3 Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949)Google Scholar, ch. 2.
4 Hacking, Ian, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 11.
5 Gombrich, E. H., Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon, 1977), 14 Google Scholar.
6 Heidegger, Martin (1954), ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, trans. Levitt, W., in his Basic Writings, ed. Krell, D. F., revised edn (London: Routledge 1993), 318 Google Scholar.
7 Hardy, G. H. (1942), A Mathematician's Apology, Canto edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 150–1Google Scholar.
8 Brandom, Robert, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 4 Google Scholar.
9 Op. cit. note 8, 21.
10 Korsgaard, Christine, ‘Two Distinctions in Goodness’, Philosophical Review 92 (1983), 170 Google Scholar.
11 ‘… an insufficient but necessary part of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the result’, Mackie, J. L., ‘Causes and Conditions’, in Causation, ed. Sosa, E. and Tooley, M. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993), 34 Google Scholar.