Summary: | Science and literature has been seen in opposition to each other since the Enlightenment Period when Modernity was beginning to establish itself. Science was then becoming more poignant with the increased societal interest of objectivity of experience, which thus led to a heightening tension between the arts and sciences. A scientist by training and writer by vocation, Snow’s 1959 lecture on “The Two Cultures” presented an antagonistic model of the cultural domains of science and literature that remains pertinent. According to C.P. Snow, there is “a gulf of mutual incomprehension, […] hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding […and] a curious distorted image of each other” between the two cultures. Not all thinkers, however, felt that way. I.A. Richards, for instance, felt that there should be no reconciliation of the sciences and the humanities (Science and Poetry) in that there were too many differences; not only a linguistic difference but to their fields of interests and language within ‘the two cultures'.
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