Abstract: Locke belongs, of course, in the history of psychology; Darwin belongs, equally decisively, in the history of English literature; Freud belongs in the history of neuroscience; Goethe in the history of biology. All of them belong, as well, in other disciplinary histories. These remarks are about the history or the practice of some contemporary disciplines: psychologists, neuroscientists, or biologists interested in the history of their subject would (or, at any rate, should) know these names as those of their predecessors; scholars of nineteenth-century English literature worth their salt could find things to say about the place of Darwin in the history of English prose. Each of these four writers is taught in departments of literary study regularly in this country; in that context, the relation of their scientific contributions to our current understanding of the natural world is not likely to be a central focus. And that is right. It is obviously not the task of the literary academy to transmit scientific understandings. But it is interesting that, of these writers, Locke and Goethe would be welcome on our humanities faculties, while Darwin and Freud would have found their natural home in departments of biology or psychology; and that fact reflects something that happened in the course of the nineteenth century to the organization of our intellectual lives, something decisive for our thinking about the future of the humanities. It is well-known, of course, that academic life, like all life, became in creasingly professionalized in the nineteenth century and that this process
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 4
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