Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 24, No. 100.
         Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                       www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist
                Submit to: humanist@lists.digitalhumanities.org

        Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 07:42:02 +0100
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: disciplines

Those interested in the historical dimension of disciplinarity will be
glad to know about G. E. R. Lloyd's latest book, Disciplines in the
Making (Oxford, 2009), in which he examines the development of
philosophy, mathematics, history, medicine, art, law, religion and
science from their beginnings, using comparative materials, chiefly from
ancient Greece and China. In the last footnote of the book
(unfortunately omitted by the publisher, here recovered from Lloyd
himself), he notes that,

> Lip-service is sometimes paid to the advantages of a mastery of a
> variety of disciplines, and polymaths such as Leonardo and Newton are
> held up as models of human genius. But when it comes to implementing
> programmes of collaborative research, the complaint is still often
> made that each of the participants approaches the problems too much
> influenced by the particular ways they were taught to handle them in
> their original specialisations.  (not on p. 181)

The great examples we have of major collaborative undertakings from the
sciences -- greatest of all, perhaps, the Manhattan Project -- involved
experts cooperating, sometimes made to cooperate by a commanding leader
such as Oppenheimer. At our local level, we see (but so far have not
studied) the beginnings of the sort of mastery Lloyd here speaks of, in
the settings and situations the digital humanities are capable of
bringing about. Lloyd's book (unsurprisingly when you think about it) is
a sobering, and thrilling, (re)minder of how large and complex the world
of disciplinarity is.

The story of incommesurability among ways of knowing and communicating
is told e.g. in the story of the Tower of Babel, with its prior vision
of one universal language, or we might say, one universal discipline.
But before that story was told, and ever since, poets and scholars have
not stopped triangulating on that which can never be reached except in
such visions. The scholar's way is exemplified magnificiently by Lloyd's
book. Read it tonight!