our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed Science used to be broad because so few people could afford to do it. Now that more people can participate, the structures need to evolve too. Philosopher Alan Love explains.
Alan Love is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Philosophy and Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, as well as the Director of the Minnesota[…] Alan Love is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Philosophy and Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, as well as the Director of the Minnesota[…] Alan Love, philosopher and Director of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota, makes the historical case for why academic disciplines exist — and why they've outlasted their original purpose. Drawing on figures from Newton to Darwin to the Vienna Circle, Love traces how disciplinary structure was built to coordinate a growing scientific community, not to map reality. He describes what gets lost when the boundaries harden: collaborations that don't form, questions that don't get asked, and researchers who pay a career price for working across the lines.
ALAN LOVE:When we approach the sort of modern landscape of disciplines in academic spaces, we tend to think, isn't this the natural way for things to be? But in fact, they are of relatively recent invention, in that most of the architecture that we experience, say, in a modern university context, arose in the 19th century. Breaking the boundaries: the case for interdisciplinary science, with Alan Love.
For most of organized human history, when people were interested in questions, they studied them but did not necessarily have sharp boundaries about who was allowed to study them or whether you could ask only one kind of question rather than another about, say, the planets or medicine or the behavior of light or something like that. So what happens in the 18th and 19th century in particular is that the community of investigators grows in size. For most of history, the people involved was just a very small number.
And as the community gets larger, we need some form of organization. And that form of organization starts to fall out along lines of interest that people have in different kinds of phenomena. So the chemists that we think about are interested in chemistry and we see chemistry emerge as a space or physics as a space and different areas of physics, so the study of optics or the study of planetary motion.
And into the 20th century, that structure starts to also solidify for the humanities and social sciences. Philosophy isn't a discipline until the late 19th, early 20th century. The origin of the American Philosophical Association is actually 1895.
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