Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians
Though everyone endorses science when it can cure disease, monitor the environment, or bash political opponents, the intrusion of science into the territories of the humanities has been deeply resented. Just as reviled is the application of scientific reasoning to religion; many writers without a trace of a belief in God maintain that there is something unseemly about scientists weighing in on the biggest questions. In the major journals of opinion, scientific carpetbaggers are regularly accused of determinism, reductionism, essentialism, positivism, and worst of all, something called “scientism.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-humanities
Crimes Against Humanities: Now science wants to invade the liberal arts. Don’t let it happen.
The question of the place of science in knowledge, and in society, and in life, is not a scientific question. Science confers no special authority, it confers no authority at all, for the attempt to answer a nonscientific question. It is not for science to say whether science belongs in morality and politics and art. Those are philosophical matters, and science is not philosophy, even if philosophy has since its beginnings been receptive to science. Nor does science confer any license to extend its categories and its methods beyond its own realms, whose contours are of course a matter of debate.
https://newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism
Science vs. the Humanities, Round III
Wieseltier bristles at my suggestion that science is distinguished by the value it places on the thorough-going intelligibility of the world—on the relentless search beyond the explanation of a phenomenon for a still deeper explanation of the explicans. Yet he legislates that the humanities may tolerate no such curiosity.
https://newrepublic.com/article/114754/steven-pinker-leon-wieseltier-debate-science-vs-humanities
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