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Revision as of 16:32, 1 April 2007 by 90.128.51.192 (talk)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)| Author | John Brockman |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date | 1995 |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-684-82344-6 Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character |
The Third Culture is a book by John Brockman which discusses the work of several well-known thinkers who are directly communicating their new, sometimes provocative, ideas to the general public. John Brockman has continued the themes of 'The Third Culture' in the website of the Edge Foundation, where leading scientists and thinkers contribute their thoughts in plain English.
The title of the book refers to Charles Percy Snow's 1959 work The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, which described the conflict between the cultures of the humanities and science.
Twenty-three people were included in the book:
- physicist Paul Davies
- biologist Richard Dawkins
- philosopher Daniel Dennett
- paleontologist Niles Eldredge
- chaos theorist J. Doyne Farmer
- theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann
- biologist Brian Goodwin
- geologist/biologist Stephen Jay Gould
- physicist Alan Guth
- inventor W. Daniel Hillis
- theoretical psychologist Nicholas Humphrey
- geneticist Steve Jones
- biologist Stuart Kauffman
- complex systems specialist Christopher Langton
- biologist Lynn Margulis
- mathematician and computer scientist Marvin Minsky
- mathematical physicist Roger Penrose
- cognitive scientist Steven Pinker
- theoretical astrophysicist Martin Rees
- cognitive scientist Roger Schank
- theoretical physicist Lee Smolin
- biologist Francisco Varela
- evolutionary biologist George C. Williams
The book had an influence on the reception of popular scientific literature not only in the United States. In Germany the book inspired several news papers to integrate scientific reports into the "Feuilleton" or "culture" section (such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). At the same time the assertions of the book were controversely discussed, especially the implicit assertion, that "third culture thinking" is mainly an American development. Although critics acknowledge, that whereas in the anglo-saxon culture there is a large tradition of scientists writing popular books, no such tradition existed for a long period in the German and French language area, where often Journalists took this part. But some decades ago there were also scientists like the physicists Heisenberg and Schrödinger or the psychologist Piaget who fulfil the criteria Brockman named for "Third culture". The German author Gabor Paal suggested that the idea of the "Third culture" is a rather modern version of what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called Realphilosophie (real philosophy).
References
- John Brockman, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution, Simon & Schuster: 1995 ISBN 0-684-82344-6
- Gabor Paal, Was ist schön? Ästhetik und Erkenntnis, Koenighausen & Neumann (2003), Würzburg.
ISBN 3826024257