Problematizing and enlarging the notion of humanistic education

In a lecture given in 1959, called 'The two cultures', Charles P. Snow complained about the split between what he called the traditional literary culture and the progressive scientific culture. Today, a much more visible abyss seems to separate the culture of the humanities from the culture of management. Many of the presuppositions and arguments used in Snow's lecture and in the ensuing debate seem outdated. As Stefan Collini (1998) reminds us in his introduction to the new edition of Snow's book, the map of the disciplines has changed significantly, and continues to change. On the one hand, historians and sociologists of science have altered the way we understand scientific progress, and physics (the model for all modern sciences) has introduced unpredictability and randomness into its core. On the other hand, most scholars in the humanities are today much less interested in the preservation of a great tradition; they are more concerned about their specialization in a narrower and manageable body of literature than about 'literary culture' in general, ant they write research projects imitating their colleagues from the natural sciences.