给Edge网的布罗克曼先生的一封邮件

武夷山

2003年5月16日

Dear Prof. Brockman:

I love your “the third culture” concept and Edge site very much. In fact in my published articles (in Chinese) I cited your idea more than once. Today I read your article “The New Humanists” with great interest. Here I’d like to discuss some points:

1.      Why there are much fewer new humanists among humanities scholars than among scientists? Maybe part of the reason lies in the fact that there is a sort of hierarchy in human knowledge, with natural science knowledge on the top while humanities knowledge at lower position—it does not mean, however, that scientists are more important than humanities scholars. We have countless examples where scientists turn into novelists or poets (e.g. Leonardo Sinisgalli), but we have very few humanities scholars turning into scientists, with the only example I could recall at the moment being De Broglie.  

2.      How could we educate and cultivate more new humanists in the future? To answer this question, we need to investigate how today’s new humanists grew up. I’m wondering whether you have done any survey about the career paths and formulation of academic interest among all the current new humanists with whom you have close contact. I guess such survey results must be very exciting.

3.      At present, almost all the new humanists introduced in Edge site are scholars that grew up in Western cultures, which is a big pity! In my opinion, the genuine “third culture” should be both the combination of science with humanities and the combination of Western culture with Eastern culture. I hope that some day C. N. Yang, T. T, Lee, and similar scholars with other cultural background would appear in your Edge list. From both C. N. Yang and T. D. Lee’s Chinese articles I could judge that both of them possess very profound knowledge in Chinese literature, philosophy and history so that they should be qualified candidates for “new humanists”.

I look forward to reading more inspiring papers in your site and I also hope that if you happen to travel to Beijing some day, please visit our institute and deliver a lecture to us.

Wu Yishan

Senior Research Fellow

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC)