C.P. Snow

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The Society's artistic justification and value will grow and develop over time in synchrony with the scientific content, becoming an important illustration of the possibility of unifying science and art in the life of Man. This indeed may reveal itself to be the highest value generated by the study of the human visage in all its mysterious dimensions through the worldwide activities of the Society for Faces.

Readers are advised that this paper forms the foundation for three newer writings that should be read together with it for an integrated and particularized approach to the context, the form (or plan), the neurophysiological underpinnings, and the exhibition of the Trifurcated Face of Man (see 'Plan of Face Derived and Explained,' The Soul of Life and the Spirit of War,' and 'Desiderata for Primary Exhibition of the Face' on this page).

A fifth paper ('Convergences of Human Face in Life and Death') will, in due course, clarify and strengthen the contributions to the theory of the face by the present author and form the basis for substantial new research on the idealist theory of the Visage of Man by theorizing the integration of the individual facial conformation at first maturity with the totalized face in death (the Totenmask), all as envisioned by the 'Prospectus of the Society for Faces,' but now at last rooted in true psychology and demonstrable neurophysical reality.

Readers of this foundational paper originally dated 2000 will benefit from our recently uploaded analytical conspectus ('Analysis of Max Picard's "Human Face" With Implications for Portraiture and Its Exhibition') (which is essentially paper #6).

Coming soon in addition is a further paper ('Thematic Apperceptions of Max Picard's "Human Face" With Implications for Portraiture and Its Exhibition') (which will be #7) based on a close re-reading of Picard's masterwork in the astoundingly faithful poetical dress given to it by the late screenwriter S. Goldstein (1930), originally published in New York.

The translation of Picard is not mentioned in published accounts of Goldstein's career or in his 'New York Times' obituary (he died in 1970) but it undoubtedly constitutes Goldstein's most notable literary achievement. This is especially noteworthy since Goldstein, who studied languages at Columbia University, was by all accounts obstreperously leftist-materialist in outlook (actually a communist) but in Picard brilliantly and objectively handled the masterwork of an extraordinarily strong idealist at the height of his powers.

This introduction situates the forum in the recent scholarship on the “two cultures.” It argues that for a long time two concepts exerted a powerful influence over our thinking about the intertwined histories of the sciences and the humanities: “the Scientific Revolution,” by offering a historical beginning for their separation, and C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” thesis, by offering an end point for this development. Of late both of them have lost in persuasiveness. Recent research offers a more balanced view of the innovations of seventeenth-century naturalists, puts more weight on developments that took place during the long nineteenth century, and highlights the limits of the division. Instead of presupposing a single, unified divide, different attempts to demarcate both the sciences and the humanities have to be studied with an eye on the specifics of their intellectual, disciplinary, and wider cultural contexts. This forum maps the problem in this vein, offers different interpretations, and widens the scope of our discussion in both geographical and chronological terms.
to demarcate both the sciences and the humanities have to be studied with an eye
on the specifics of their intellectual, disciplinary, and wider cultural contexts. This forum
maps the problem in this vein, offers different interpretations, and widens the
scope of our discussion in both geographical and chronological terms.
the innovations of seventeenth-century naturalists, puts more weight on developments
that took place during the long nineteenth century, and highlights the limits
of the division. Instead of presupposing a single, unified divide, different attempts
to demarcate both the sciences and the humanities have to be studied with an eye
on the specifics of their intellectual, disciplinary, and wider cultural contexts. This forum
maps the problem in this vein, offers different interpretations, and widens the
scope of our discussion in both geographical and chronological terms.
Few

This article develops a philosophy of the humanities by reading C.P. Snow’s famous thesis of “the two cultures” through the early work of Alfred North Whitehead. I argue that, whereas Snow refers to Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, he ultimately paves the way for a reductive interpretation of humanities scholarship, which is a move that can be repaired by delving into Snow’s own reference to Whitehead following a diffractive reading methodology. This way of reading was first formulated in the context of feminist epistemology (but can be found elsewhere and under different names) in an attempt to generate constructively conceptual rather than closed hermeneutical readings of theoretical texts by making the reading dynamic and open-ended (in Karen Barad’s terms: reading their insights “through” one another). As such, reading diffractively shies away from relying on classification and is playful with the past, present, and future of the humanities. The article argues that the diffraction of Snow and Whitehead hinges on theories of “beauty” and will demonstrate (with Whitehead) that humanities scholarship originates in a total environment in which works of art—as the subject matter of humanities research—stand out and preserve themselves as “enduring objects”.

The Books' Journal, 83 (Δεκ. 2017), 24-26: Ανακοίνωση στην ημερίδα «Η διαδραστική σχέση Πανεπιστημίου και κοινωνίας», Σπίτι της Κύπρου, 3.10.17. Οργάνωση: Τομέας Ανθρωπιστικών, Κοινωνικών Επιστημών και Δικαίου, Σχολή Εφαρμοσμένων Μαθηματικών και Φυσικών Επιστημών, ΕΜΠ

This article engages with the philosophical reflections of the French historian of science Hélène Metzger (1886–1944) in order to develop a vocabulary for understanding the rise of non-reductive Continental naturalism in the contemporary humanities. The bibliography of current naturalist approaches in the arts and the human sciences is still in the making, but it is altogether clear that the trend is not scientist or historicist or relativist. This epistemological diagnosis refers us to Metzger, who found herself surrounded with the logical positivism of the Wiener Kreis, on the one hand, and the historicism of her French colleagues, on the other, as well as with the infiltration of the history of science by a chronological empiricism. In this article I will take the most recent book of Vicki Kirby – Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large from 2011 – as an exemplary case of non-reductive Continental naturalist scholarship in the humanities today and by reading it through the concepts of Metzger, I will demonstrate how this type of research leads to refreshing insights in what constitutes positive humanities knowledge and what is the role of the a priori in the field.

The English physical chemist C.P. Snow is most renowned for his 1959 Rede Lecture The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution in which he lamented the intellectual divide between the sciences and the humanities. His work as a prolific writer of fiction, however, is less well-known, though he wrote seventeen novels over the course of his lifetime. New Lives for Old, published anonymously in 1933 and subsequently suppressed by the author, is the most obscure of these works. The novel’s fictional protagonist Billy Pilgrim, a professor of biophysics at Kings College, London, develops a technique for synthesising a human sex hormone which can prevent the atrophy of the ageing body. The first part of this paper draws on new archival documents to sketch the background to the novel’s publication and suppression. The second part situates the novel in relation to the under-explored subgenre of rejuvenation fiction from the early decades of the twentieth century, emphasising the dynamic exchange of rejuvenation discourses during this period across the medical and cultural spheres. The third and final part draws on the sociological concept of hegemonic masculinity to illuminate the book’s androcentrism and its sexism, tracing the ways in which C.P. Snow mobilises the gendered concept and practice of medical rejuvenation to navigate perceived threats to male privilege and authority.

This essay uses personal pedagogical reflections about teaching science filmmakers to critique "scientific privilege" and instead to develop a "third culture," a media world of artistically and ideologically complex science films. The essay builds toward comparisons between Carl Sagan's Cosmos (1980), Jacques Derrida's nuclear criticism, and Stanley Kubrick's 2001 (1968).