The Gap Between Science and Humanities: Are There Two Cultures ?

Once found in the same individuals, science and humanities have taken their separate ways somewhere between the mathematical and philosophical works of R. Descartes, around 1650, and the difficult dialogue between A. Einstein and H. Bergson, in the 1920’s. Historically set by W. Dilthey in 1883, finally acknowledged by C.P. Snow in 1959 and spectacularly demonstrated by the "Sokal hoax" in 1996, the story of such a divergence involves thinkers from the two sides of what was formerly seen as the joint faces of a single flipping coin. Are there, nowadays, some signs that the gap between Science and Humanities can be bridged again? This lecture will try to provide some light on how this deep divorce has happened.