Immanuel Wallerstein

This book tells the story of how the very idea of "two cultures"—the so-called divorce between science and the humanities—was a creation of the modern world-system that was consolidated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the establishment of the faculties and disciplines of the modern university system. The contributors, working from a common research framework, trace the divorce of "facts" and "values"—indivisible within medieval Europe’s structures of knowledge—as part of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This led to a polarization of universalist "science" (destined to become dominant as the empirical mode of arriving at "truth") and the particularist "humanities" (defending its legitimacy as an alternative, more empathetic mode of knowing) and finally to the creation of the social sciences as an uneasy intermediary in this epistemological debate. The book addresses contemporary attempts to overcome the division between the "two cultures" that emerge from science, feminism, racial and ethnic studies, cultural studies, and ecology, ending with an analysis of the culture wars and the science wars. Contributors: Boris Stremlin, Eric Mielants, Mauro Di Meglio, Mark Frezzo, Ho-fung Hung, Norihisa Yamashita, Biray Kollouðlu Kirli, Deniz Yükseker, Volkan Aytar, Ayþe Betül Colic, Agustín Lao-Montes, Sunaryo.