The Third Culture

The third culture ( original title The Third Culture ) is a book of literary agent John Brockman from the year 1995. Therein the work will be presented by some well-known thinkers who also themselves have the opportunity to present their sometimes quite provocative theses of the public.

Content

The title of the book refers to CP Snow's 1959 published work The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution ( The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution ). Snow described in the book the chasm which " the two cultures" separates; on the one hand, the literary intellectuals and on the other side of the scientist. The cause he diagnosed the unilateral curricula of universities and as a result he called the impoverishment of both cultures. The emergence of a " third culture", a new generation of scientists, which is to close the communication gap between the two traditional cultures, he has in his second study, The Two Cultures: A Second Look prophesied 1963.

In The Third Culture denies Brockman Snow's optimistic attitude, that effective communication between the two cultures was in sight. He claims instead that the current movement of contemporary scientists who are trying in their popular science publications, answers to the so-called " ultimate questions " to a wider audience, was the third culture.

One of the scientists featured in the book include the following: from the biology field, George C. Williams, Stuart Kauffman, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and Niles Eldredge; from cognitive research Marvin Minsky, Roger Schank, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker and Roger Penrose; from cosmology Martin Rees, Lee Smolin and Paul Davies; and from the complexity of research of Nobel Laureates Murray Gell-Mann, J. Doyne Farmer and W. Daniel Hillis.

The idea of ​​the third culture was particularly taken up in Germany by the FAZ, which has opened its feuilleton scientists in this field. As the journalist Gábor Paál in his book What is beautiful? shows, Brockman's "third culture" largely reflected in what Hegel called Real Philosophy: A type of philosophy that is very much based on the scientific facts and there thinks ahead, where empirical science reaches its limits.

Brockman has continued to work with the themes of The Third Culture on the websites of the Edge Foundation. Leading scientists and thinkers convey there ideas in simple language.