#TTCA (The Two Cultures Again) --- SynTalk

SynTalk thinks about the ‘sciences’ and the ‘humanities’, and speculates on the genesis, present and the future of this dichotomy. Is the 1959 Rede lecture of CP Snow still relevant, or have changes of knowledge systems & technology made the concern banal? The concepts are derived off / from Copernicus, Donne, Bacon, Newton, Gulliver’s Travels (in Laputa), Alexander Pope, Riemann, Einstein, Marconi, Heisenberg, Heidegger, life-world (Husserl, Habermas), Hardy, Korzybski, CP Snow, Leavis, Feynman, Deleuze, Wilson, Levi-Strauss, & Buffett, among others. Were there ever any polymaths? We look at the possible link between the establishment of the Royal Society (like a trade union), Newtonian physics, colonialism, and Hitler? Is there consilience & bricolage in knowledge (a la ingredients in a salad bowl)? Do ideas have a rhizomatic structure? Is Mathematics closer to art than to science? Has man’s desire to understand nature led to the ‘anthropocene life-world’ (with disciplines such as digital humanities and cybernetics)? Does ‘episteme’ have to become an easy-to-use ‘API’ to spread? Does a platform (created by designers & engineers) have to be so easy that it is beautiful (a la Angry Birds, Airbnb, Square)? The importance of ‘groundedness’; is “T-shaped” interdisciplinarity the only possible form? The importance of a ‘gifted person’ to make connections. The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Prafulla C. Kar (literature, philosophy, Centre for Contemporary Theory, Vadodara), Prof. M. S. Raghunathan (mathematics, IIT Bombay, ex-TIFR, Mumbai), & Kunal Shah (computer sciences, philosophy, Freecharge, Mumbai)